Peppe Poeta has granted Brescia a dream of the championship

After enchanting for years on the parquets of half of Italy (with a brief stint in Spain), Peppe Poeta has moved to the other side, where he didn't think he could end up. He wanted to be a general manager , he who had always been used to evaluating talent, especially his own, in a decidedly demanding way: he wanted and had to prove he was up to the level of Serie A and had put himself on the geographical map of our basketball thanks to a 51-point game at the time of Prima Veroli. Poeta has never had anything easy in his career: he earned every minute he played, every step a conquest, up to Bologna, Vitoria, the National team, an incredible Italian Cup raised as captain of Turin under the orders of Paolo Galbiati, who in 2018 was practically his age. On the other side, that day, there was Brescia, defeated in the sprint: he would never have thought he would be able to lead them, a few years later, to their first championship final in history, which arrived, with a terrible irony of fate, precisely in the season in which the football team was about to blow up.

For Poeta, this is his first season as a head coach . He had imagined a career as a manager, then a phone call came from Ettore Messina, looking for an assistant after Gianmarco Pozzecco left for the national team. But Poz had the same idea: he wanted him on the Italian staff. An elective affinity, that between the Italbasket coach and the man from Battipaglia: both former playmakers, both capable of shattering opposing defenses with the ball in hand despite a build far from that of the giants they faced. After that double, yes, they were years of precious apprenticeship: Poeta observed, captured with his eyes, learned the trade from two profiles decidedly distant from each other.

In June 2024, the call from Brescia , fresh from the victory of the Italian Cup and a semifinal of the championship with Alessandro Magro on the bench in the previous two years. A courageous choice, a heavy legacy not to be lost and to be honored. Poeta was needed to break down a duopoly that in recent years had made Italian basketball boring : since 2019, the year of the triumph of coach De Raffaele's Reyer over Pozzecco's Dinamo Sassari, a name other than Virtus Bologna and Olimpia Milano had not been seen in the final. Of course, Brescia was lucky, if you can say so, to see the two battleships finish on the opposite side of the scoreboard, thanks to the ramshackle Milanese season, but it still had the ability to sweep away in three games the revelation of the season, Trapani , the terrible newly promoted team coached by an old saint like Jasmin Repesa. To overcome the Virtus wall, a miracle will be needed: "We are beyond all expectations, it will take a feat and perhaps not even the best version of ourselves will be enough: I told my boys to enjoy it", he said a few days ago to Repubblica, aware that the pressure is all on the shoulders of Ivanovic's boys . He is not even thinking about becoming a GM now.

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