CSKA retained its invincibility – Newspaper Kommersant No. 11 (7456) dated 01/21/2023
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The first round of the regular season of the VTB United League closed with a super match, in which the currently best team in the league, CSKA, hosted its current champion, Zenit. Stronger again was CSKA, who won with a score of 100:80. For the army team, this is the 22nd victory in a row.
The final of last season, which ended with the victory of Zenit, despite the fact that it was inferior to CSKA in the series up to four victories and 0:2, and 1:3, gave the confrontation between the two “capital” teams a special feature. It was the first time in many years that the army machine could not reach the title. Actually, before the 2021/22 season, the VTB United League (since 2009) had only two champions. In 2011, Khimki won, in all other cases – CSKA. But the appearance of a real competitor for the hegemon, like Zenit, cannot go unnoticed. Just as it cannot but give hope that the next season will be held in the same stubborn struggle.
Reality, however, has not lived up to expectations. CSKA did not face a solid opposition. On the contrary, the army team, who, after the removal of Russian teams from participating in European competitions, do not need to disperse their forces, issued a fantastic series of 21 victories in a row. Neither UNICS (second place in the standings with two defeats), nor the same Zenit (third place and five lost matches at once) resisted such a breakthrough.
So the outcome of the confrontation for leadership at the end of the first stage of the regular season was a foregone conclusion long before the last round.
But in this story, as often happens, it’s all about the details. The current championship of the VTB United League is being held in a new format. “Regular” is divided into two stages. According to the results of the first (two-round with 12 participants), the teams will be divided into two sixes – the top one (the top 6 teams automatically received tickets to the play-offs) and the bottom one (its participants will compete for two more places in the knockout round). At the second stage, which starts already at the end of January, the participants will again hold two-round tournaments, but the points obtained at the first stage will also be taken into account. So even the match between CSKA and Zenit had its own tournament weight. Let’s add that CSKA, UNICS, Zenit, MBA, Nizhny Novgorod, Lokomotiv-Kuban got into group A, Parma, Samara, Avtodor, Yenisei, Astana and Minsk.
Already the beginning of the match showed that the teams do not even think about any underestimation of his tournament significance. The guests, led by Tom Ertel, got off to a strong start. The Frenchman did not so much threaten the army ring himself as he created opportunities for teammates, and in many respects with his assistance, Zenit had a surplus of ten points already in the debut of the match. But he, despite all his external solidity, turned out to be very unreliable. It is not surprising when a team of the CSKA level has to resist. The army team, who, after some slipping, got involved in the work of Alexey Shved (by the big break he scored a dozen and a half points), it took only a couple of shock minutes to even out the match, after which the game switched to swing mode.
In this stably unstable state, it remained almost until the beginning of the final quarter, when CSKA began to gather something like a breakaway of two or three attacks.
To achieve this, the Shved had to work, Nikola Milutinov to push under the rings, and, most importantly, to show sniper talent to Casper Weir (in the third quarter he gave a real show, scoring 20 points in 10 minutes, and as a result, with 27 points in the asset, he became the most scoring player of the meeting). Well, Zenit was a bit unlucky. Even at the beginning of the third ten-minute period, Sergey Karasev, the most productive player of the team at that time, received an injury. He missed one quarter, returned to the court in the last one, but did not show the previous performance. So, CSKA managed to keep a quite comfortable lead in the region of nine or ten points without excessive efforts. Toward the end, the army team added more and won big – 100:80, recording an outstanding result – 22 matches of the regular season without defeat.
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