Kazan players broke through the best defense – Sport – Kommersant
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UNICS beat the reigning champions of the VTB United League Zenit in the first match of the semi-final play-off series. The hosts solved most of the problems in the first quarter, after which they only increased their advantage and defeated the best defending team in the league with a score of 94:67. However, Kazan also started the semi-finals of last season with a victory over St. Petersburg, but in the end they were knocked out of the tournament.
The semi-final battle between UNICS and Zenit belongs to the kind of confrontation, the outcome of which is surprisingly difficult to predict. After all, no matter how you compare the teams, you get almost exact equality. In the regular season, UNICS and Zenit took second and third places, respectively. In four face-to-face meetings, they won two victories each. Even for the entire time of performances in the VTB United League, Kazan and St. Petersburg upset each other an equal number of times – 17 each.
Against this backdrop and from the first semi-final match of the principal rivals, one should have expected some intriguing confrontation between the UNICS attack (Kazan has the second most powerful after CSKA) and Zenit’s defense (Javi Pascual’s team has the best in the league).
In fact, it turned out to be a rout of the guests. It wasn’t some sudden thing that happened, let’s say, because of one disastrous stretch. “Zenith” did not play well the whole match.
Except for the starting minutes, when the guests answered blow for blow, it is difficult to write down something for them in the asset. The team was simply not like itself, it lost the ball in the simplest situations, and it was difficult to convert chances. So, the starting five of “Zenith” for the match chalked up only 13 points. And no matter how hard Pascual tried to find a saving combination of players, nothing came of it. After the match, he himself said that his team, it seems, remained in St. Petersburg. The coach also noted that he could only remember two or three matches when Zenit played so badly.
However, even if Xavi Pascual had groped for the right option, this most likely would not have helped. Still, UNICS was very good. There are days when the team almost everything works out, and this one turned out to be just that (75% of hits from two-pointers and 45% of three-pointers confirm this).
Let’s say, Louis Labery, and his hits gave UNICS an early lead in the score of nine points, which only grew in the future, converted five out of seven attempts. Marcos Knight did not miss even once, Jalen Reynolds and Vyacheslav Zaitsev were happy to score points for every taste. So almost everything in the game was clear by the big break. And after the third quarter, when the gap between the hosts reached 24 points, the last doubts disappeared. UNICS won with a score of 94:67.
It is interesting that Kazan started the semi-finals last season with a victory over Zenit. Not so large, but guest. But this did not prevent Zenit from winning three matches in a row (this season the semi-finals will go up to four victories), which was reminded by UNICS coach Velimir Peresovich, who expressed fears that a coach like Pascual would definitely come up with something.
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