Undoubtedly the game should not have been played. That is the only certainty, and it would have erased all of the resulting uncertainties. Once the game had begun there could be no clear answers, only smearing accusations.

For example, the Olympiakos president, Socratis Kokkalis, says he offered to postpone the game for five to seven days, but that CSKA declined the offer. This is denied, however, by the Russian team's general manager, Iouri Iourkov, who says that the FIBA official at the game refused to take responsibility for postponing it.

"He said we must play the game," Iourkov said. "He said he would try to do everything for the best of our team, but after 15 minutes of play you could see that it is all very strange. After the game, in the hall, I talked to the president of Olympiakos and asked him what about the idea of us playing the game again when we are healthy, but he said, 'I don't know about that, I don't know.' It is bull. If you want to do something, you do it."

Asked if he believed that Olympiakos was responsible for what FIBA is now calling a poisoning, Iourkov said: "I think it's not a good question. We cannot answer that officially. But you think, who has the most interest in this result, in this situation, in going to the Final Four? The answer is all of Greece, maybe. All of Greece wants the result that Olympiakos goes onto the finals."

Of course the Greeks wanted their team to win. They wanted it so badly they couldn't see that the best thing for them to do was to demand that the game not be played at all. That doesn't necessarily mean they poisoned the opposition.