China beats Egypt for 3rd place at Stankovic Cup

SHENZHEN, China, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Team Red of the Chinese men's basketball national team beat Egypt 90-64 to win the third place at the Stankovic Continental Cup 2017 here on Sunday, while Germany defeated Croatia 69-65 for the championship title.

China, who edged out Egypt by 71-70 on Thursday, used a 15-0 run in the middle of the first quarter to set up a lead of 15 points after that period. The host enlarged the lead to 19 before the halftime.

In their first meet on Thursday, China led as many as 17 points in the match but almost got defeated by the Egyptians. And the visiting team almost repeated that in today's match. A 7-2 run and another 10-2 in the third quarter cut China's lead to only eight and forced Li Nan, head coach of the Team Red to call to timeout.

Things got improved after the timeout as the Chinese answered with a 8-1 run. From then on, the Egyptians never got the chance to close the gap and could only see the Chinese secured the victory with a lead of 26 points.

"We did cut the lead with some points when we were falling behind." said Amr Abou Elkhir, head coach of the Egypt team, "But the Chinese team did better job today to stop us. And my team made some mistakes, which caused us the match."

All 11 Chinese players except Yuan Shuai had scores while Wang Zhelin led the team with a match-high 18 points. Haytham Khalifa led Ehypt with 16.

"We did better in both defense and offense than we did in the last match against Germany." said Li Nan. "I asked my players to put more pressure on our opponents and we had 16 steals in the match, which gave us lots fastbreak chances. And we did great in defense as we outrebounded 36-26. We are improving from every match."

In Sunday's final, Germany came from behind to beat Croatia 69-65 to win the title. Robin Amaize of Germany was rewarded the MVP trophy of the tournament.