Basketball “Lokomotiv-Kuban” beat UNICS
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In the central match of the game week of the regular championship of the VTB United League in Krasnodar, the current champion and the silver medalist of the tournament, UNICS and Lokomotiv-Kuban, met. The Krasnodar players played very high-quality basketball, won with a score of 90:82 and took third place in the standings. UNICS remained first, but CSKA is breathing down its neck.
There is very little time left before the regular championship of the VTB United League ends. The teams will play their last matches at this stage in mid-April. And given how tight the tournament table has turned out to be at this point, each meeting takes on special weight. However, for UNICS and Lokomotiv-Kuban this weight was still slightly different.
Kazan is, of course, the most effective team in the second part of the regular season, during which they stumbled only once before Tuesday, losing to Parma, but at the same time managing to beat all their main competitors – CSKA, Zenit and Lokomotiv – once each. If it weren’t for the breakdown in Perm, Velimir Perasovic’s team would have felt noticeably more reliable, having a two-win lead over second-placed CSKA. Well, the failure in Krasnodar could again reduce UNICS’s reserves to symbolic.
As for Lokomotiv-Kuban, its main task at the moment is to take third place from Zenit, and if you’re lucky, try to reach CSKA.
Until Tuesday, Krasnodar and St. Petersburg were equal in key indicators, but on March 28, Zenit meets CSKA, and in this match they may well lose points.
And it seems that Krasnodar coach Alexander Sekulich conveyed the importance of this task to his players quite clearly. Lokomotiv-Kuban in this match, frankly speaking, did not quite look like itself – in a good way. Krasnodar players tend to somehow very slowly get involved in the game, let go of the opponent, and only then turn on the heroic mode and try to fix everything. One of the most striking examples is the December confrontation with the same UNICS, during which Lokomotiv-Kuban won back “minus 21” and pulled out a victory in the end.
But here the railway workers clearly did not want to bring the matter to the point of heroic deeds. The team looked great in defense, not only preventing the opponent from getting to the basket, but also taking the ball away from him on the far approaches to him. And Sekulic’s most successful personnel decision was probably the replacement of Andrei Martyuk, who started in the starting lineup, with another “big” – Kirill Elatontsev. He hit often and drew the attention of opponents who were forced to leave, say, Devon Acuna-Purcell unattended. It is not surprising that the latter scored 14 points already in the first half of the match, and 25 in total during the game (the best performance among the participants in the meeting). Against the backdrop of the hosts’ very confident play, the guests looked somewhat disorganized. Even the usually deadly efficient Nenad Dimitrijevic rarely produced accurate hits – he was simply not allowed to shoot. So the hosts’ lead, which remained stuck at the ten-point mark for a long time, looked well deserved. Only towards the end of the third quarter, during which Jalen Reynolds began to shoot from distance, very usefully for the guests, did the Kazan team manage to eliminate the gap and even take the lead.
Alexander Sekulic urgently needed to cheer up his team. Maybe even proactively turn on the heroic mode, because UNICS has clearly seized the initiative: both gaming and psychological. Actually, this is what the Krasnodar coach did. The railway workers started up, although not immediately. It took a good half of the final quarter for the hosts to regain their mojo. The key moment was two consecutive long-range hits by Acuna-Purcell. The Krasnodar team won with a score of 90:82 and took third place. UNICS remained first, but it is very likely that CSKA will catch up with it on Thursday.
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