Army men got into a border state – Kommersant
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Lokomotiv Kuban beat CSKA in the fifth match of the play-off semi-final series with a score of 85:68. Krasnodar lead in the confrontation with a score of 3:2 and already on Friday they can create a real sensation by knocking out the army team from the tournament.
The last time CSKA was in a position where they did not feel absolute comfort at any stage of the playoffs was back in 2014. Then the army team in the second round crossed with the same Lokomotiv-Kuban and started with two defeats. At that time, the disaster (the series were held up to three, and not four, as it is now, victories) the army team managed to avoid. The team scored three victories in a row, advanced to the next round, and then won the championship without allowing a single blot. To draw direct parallels between events that are separated by almost a dozen years is a dubious occupation, but they have something in common. In particular, the feeling of some kind of “wrongness”, or something, what is happening. CSKA was the undisputed top of the VTB United League in 2014, and now it is, and, as it seemed both then and now, it simply cannot allow misfires. But he did, then, and still does.
Yes, let’s say, in the current semi-finals, the army team had circumstances on which defeats can partly be attributed. This is a long downtime due to an injury to Alexei Shved, and an injury received already during the semi-final by Nikola Milutinov (he missed both Krasnodar matches, and yesterday, although he was in the application, he did not play a second). But all this did not change the fact that the head coach of Krasnodar Alexander Sekulich seemed to have found the keys to the army game. In this sense, the third meeting of the series turned out to be indicative, during which Lokomotiv-Kuban won, having won back a deficit of 19 points! CSKA head coach Emil Rajkovic then bluntly stated that “losing such a match is a shame.” Yes, CSKA later rehabilitated, but it could still be said that the score in the series 2:2 after four matches fully reflected the current real balance of forces of the rivals. It was equal.
However, thoughts of equality were quickly put under a huge question mark already at the beginning of the fifth match. Livio Jean-Charles fired accurately from a distance in the 15th second, as if setting the tone for the game, but on this, the ability of the army team to hit the ring seemed to be turned off by someone. The guests gave a powerful spurt 12:0 and forced Rajkovic to take a timeout. He helped a little. Just as in the previous game Krasnodar could not do anything with Devonte Kaykok, Kasper Weir, Swede, now the army team themselves could not adapt to the game of Devon Akun-Purcell, Jaylen Burford, and Andrey Martyuk, terribly turned on to fight. And something “wrong” began to happen again on the site. Plus 14 on account of the railroad to the first break, plus 20 during the second quarter and plus 17 to complete it. And what was to be expected if the army team hit only eight two-pointers from the field and only twice realized long-range shots (there were 14 attempts)? Lokomotiv-Kuban’s statistics were much more decent – 14 out of 24 on two-point shots and 6 out of 14 on three-point shots. And even though there was still a good half of the match ahead, Raikovich’s game had to be saved by some emergency measures.
After the resumption of the meeting, it even seemed that Raikovich had really come up with something. CSKA finally got the attack more or less adjusted, the Swede hit a field goal for the first time since the beginning of the match, Dallas Moore had a couple of attacks that came in very handy, Samson Ruzhentsev acted very usefully. Plus, the army team supported the regime of the most severe defense. And the separation of the guests began to melt. At the moment, only seven points remained from him. According to such a game, and even 15 minutes before the siren, this is nothing. Unfortunately, for army fans, their team’s breakthrough was short-lived. The railroad workers endured a burst of activity from the opponent, did not panic, and as a result, by the end of the third ten-minute period, they were ahead by 19 points. Here CSKA already needed a real magician to save them. In the course of this series, Casper Weir has already taken on such a role, but this was not his day. He tried, but out of eight thrown three-point attempts, he did not hit a single one. As a result, Lokomotiv-Kuban confidently won with a score of 85:68, and it has only one step left to become a super sensation. Krasnodar players can make it already on April 28 at their site, where the series returns.
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