Kazan team ran ahead of Lokomotiv-Kuban – Kommersant
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UNICS defeated Lokomotiv Kuban 82:81 and took the lead in the final series of best-of-four VTB United League play-offs with a score of 2:1. Kazan got the victory due to an accurate throw by Marcos Knight six seconds before the siren. The fourth match of the series will take place on Saturday in Krasnodar.
The current play-offs of the VTB United League are going remarkably well in terms of maintaining spectator interest. Both semi-final series stretched over seven matches, and the outcome of these confrontations gave an unobvious pair of contenders for the title. The champion of the last season – Zenit, as well as the champion of almost all previous seasons – CSKA – went to the repechage series for third place (contrary to fears, the battle there is serious: CSKA leads 2: 1), and UNICS and ” Lokomotiv-Kuban.
On the May holidays, Kazan and Krasnodar managed to play two matches of the series. Both gave UNICS head coach Velimir Perasovich cause for concern.
UNICS lost the first game at home, and this is Kazan’s only defeat at home in this play-off so far. The second one was won. Technically, it was a beautiful victory: the hosts won back a 10-point gap during the final quarter, and Jalen Reynolds became the hero of the match. However, after all, the same Reynolds could not realize his chances, and then UNICS would have gone to Krasnodar with two lost matches in the liability.
The third match of the series, however, began as if the hosts were Kazan rather than Krasnodar. It must be said here that the fans of Lokomotiv-Kuban have one peculiarity: even for the most rated matches, they fill the stands closer to the middle of the second quarter. So the Krasnodar basketball players, as if having picked up this habit, decided to join the game with a delay. As a result, UNICS, whose sight was set up on the move by Daryl Macon, surprisingly easily achieved an advantage, first by 10 points, and then by 14. And this was in just seven or eight minutes. How could one not remember the sixth match of the semi-final series of Krasnodar against CSKA. In it, they could get a ticket to the final on their site, but the failure at the beginning of the match made further events of little interest. Fortunately, this time this did not happen.
The cutoff to the beginning of the real game was a long-range hit by Vladislav Yemchenko, the first of seven sniper attempts made by Krasnodar. Velimir Perasovic reacted to this throw as if his team had just lost a victory. But soon the reaction of the specialist became clear. Lokomotiv-Kuban seems to have seized the threads of the game that it had been looking for for a long time, and the game turned around. Jaylen Barford woke up, Chris Horton came out of a coma, Yemchenko added a couple more accurate shots. Plus, the hosts went so their favorite fast breaks. As a result, by the big break, the catastrophic “minus 14” in the course of the first quarter, “Lokomotiv-Kuban” turned into a “plus 4”. Gorgeous jump.
Had this happened in the second half of the match, he would have been victorious. But here he only eliminated the consequences of the initial failure. But at the same time, he got the players of Lokomotiv-Kuban cool. After the break, Sekulich’s wards terrifyingly often began to get interceptions for Kazan. UNICS, perhaps, would be more familiar if the opponent tried to build a wall in front of his ring. But the Krasnodar players chose the option of mobile and aggressive defense and did not fail. After all, after another loss of Kazan Devon Akun-Purcell brought the lead of the hosts to 10 points. And then UNICS had to figure out how to get back into the game, that is, in some way repeat the scenario of the second match of the series.
UNICS really returned, completely eliminating the backlog. The question was whether Kazan had enough strength to keep up the pace until the end of the match. After all, Perasovich played with a rotation truncated to nine players, and Macon, Nenad Dimitrievich, Louis Labeyri worked almost without rest. It could well have had an effect on the ending. And there was no doubt that she would. As well as the fact that she will become nervous. And so it happened.
The last minute of the match can be called the time of missed opportunities. Krasnodar, who were leading 81:80, twice ruined their attacks themselves. Kazanians did not punish them twice for this.
Finally, Perasovic, after a timeout, drew a simple combination that led to the throw of Marcos Knight, who set the final score – 82:81.
UNICS led the series to four wins – 2:1. The next match will take place on May 13 in Krasnodar.
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