Kazan to the kingdom – Kommersant

On Tuesday, UNICS achieved a historic achievement for itself. The Kazan team became the champion of the VTB United League. In the fifth match of the final series up to four wins, in which Velimir Perasovich’s wards faced Lokomotiv Kuban, UNICS was stronger – 98:89.

Looking back, the UNICS championship can be called the most difficult and hard-won of all the championships in the history of the VTB United League. He reigned in it for many years and still remains next to the throne of CSKA. The army team won ten championships in the 2010-2021 period. In it, if only once, Khimki flared up (2011). In it, last season, he gave out an enchanting, previously unseen show in the league, Zenit, which took the title from CSKA in the seven-match final series.

UNICS, all this time, although it was ironically one of the top clubs in Russian basketball, could not grab the gold in any way, involuntarily creating a reputation for itself as an eternally second team. Formally, not without reason.

Kazan players reached the finals of the VTB United League four times. But every time they ran into CSKA, and it did not end well for them.

At the same time, the club management could not be accused of keeping the team in a black body. Yes, to the budgets of CSKA and Zenit, to which their owners Norilsk Nickel and Gazprom provided payment of bills from 2.4 billion to 2.8 billion rubles. per year, the financial capabilities of Kazan citizens did not reach (they had no more than 1.3 billion rubles per year at their disposal in recent years). But at the same time, UNICS was steadily putting together a squad that looked solid not only in the domestic arena, but also in European competitions. So, Kazan won the European Cup in 2011, reached the final of this tournament in 2014 and 2021, and in those seasons when they got the opportunity to play in the Euroleague, they were marked by excellent segments. But exactly what cuts. To maintain the pace over a long distance when working on two fronts, UNICS simply lacked the depth of the composition. But after the Russian clubs were excommunicated from participating in European tournaments, the depth of this very composition, apparently, began to be missed. Moreover, the Kazan mentor Velimir Perasovich (in his coaching career, by the way, there are many titles, but all of them are cup titles, he won the championship for the first time) gathered a very balanced team, which included Jalen Reynolds, Vince Hunter, and Daryl Macon, and Louis Labery, and Vyacheslav Zaitsev and Andrei Vorontsevich, well known to Russian fans. Well, the main “signing” of Perasovich, which turned out to be terribly useful in the playoffs, is Nenad Dimitrievich. If not for him (which was worth, for example, the shootout between the Macedonian and Zenit leader Tom Ertel in the decisive match of the semi-finals), UNICS would not have seen any final.

Actually, Dimitrievich set the tone for the decisive match of the final, with some surprising ease, looking for points for throws from an average distance and launching seemingly uncomplicated parachutes. He did it with amazing accuracy, hitting four of his four two-point attempts in the first quarter and adding to them a long-range shot. In general, UNICS had 10 out of 12 two-point hits. There was no answer to such accuracy from the guests. Lokomotiv-Kuban’s attempts to return blow for blow most often ran into a wall in the form of Hunter. As a result, UNICS had a nine-point surplus by the end of the quarter. The hosts started the second ten minutes with an 8-0 spurt, and soon Zaitsev brought the advantage of Kazan to more than 20 points.

Lokomotiv-Kuban was limping on all wheels, its coach Alexander Sekulich tried to change something, but in vain. However, it was too early to write off the Krasnodar team even in such a situation. In the current playoffs, they have already shown outstanding comebacks – both in the confrontation with CSKA, when they won back 19 points during one of the matches, and in the last meeting with UNICS, when they eliminated a deficit of 21 points. It is not surprising that Perasovich, as soon as the opponent carried out at least a couple of good attacks, grabbed timeouts. He understood that if the breakthrough of Lokomotiv-Kuban was not nipped in the bud, then it would be very difficult to stop the Krasnodar train. The guests started the acceleration, having given out due to the hits of Jaylen Burford, Zakhar Vedishchev, a segment of 12:2. But a full-fledged return from Krasnodar did not work out. They broke the opponent’s team game quite successfully, but UNICS had Dimitrievich (he finished the match with 34 points in his asset). He just went to the ring and scored points, never allowing any ending to happen in this game.

UNICS won with a score of 98:89, won the series – 4:1 – and issued the title.

Alexander Petrov