Lokomotiv-Kuban won a strong-willed victory over UNICS
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Lokomotiv-Kuban confirmed its reputation as the king of comebacks, managing to overcome a 22-point deficit in the confrontation with the current champion of the VTB United League UNICS. The Krasnodar team played two completely different halves of the match. In the first they beat them, in the second they beat them. As a result, the team of Alexander Sekulic won, perhaps, the brightest victory since the beginning of the season, with a score of 82:75.
The meeting between Lokomotiv-Kuban and UNICS fit the definition of the match of the week in every conceivable way. That’s the minimum. Many would categorize this as a match of the month. After all, the current champion and the finalist of last season met. However, there were probably those who perfectly remembered how the first meeting between Kazan and Krasnodar in the current championship ended. She opened it, they expected something special from her, but in vain. We ended up with a rather boring game, during which UNICS quickly created a crushing 23-point lead on its own court, and then calmly led the way to victory.
On Saturday, the audience gathered in the stands probably had the feeling that the story that happened in the Kazan “Basket Hall” at the beginning of the season was now being repeated exactly in the “Basket Hall” in Krasnodar.
“Lokomotiv-Kuban” did not succeed even half of what it should have succeeded, and, say, three-point shots did not work at all (one hit in the entire first half of the match). Nevertheless, somehow the hosts, mainly through the efforts of Andrei Martyuk and Zakhar Vedishchev, held on. Until UNICS’s sniper attempts failed. The hosts were unable to respond, so soon Nenad Dimitrievich seemed to put an early end to the match. After his hit, the guests’ lead reached 20 points. The teams went into the big break with the score 46:26 in favor of UNICS. Almost immediately after the teams returned to the floor, the lead of Velimir Perasovic’s team even reached 22 points.
However, unlike the Kazan meeting, on their site Lokomotiv-Kuban found the strength to get out of even such a situation. This was not some kind of crushing breakthrough performed by the Krasnodar team. Not at all. And you can’t blame UNICS for suddenly getting up and falling apart. The team continued to play, although, perhaps a little earlier than it should have, it switched to the mode of maintaining the advantage it had gained (but it was huge!). But Lokomotiv-Kuban started making long-range shots, Jaylen Barford and Devon Akun-Purcell felt their game, and Martyuk continued to work reliably. And step by step the hosts began to reduce the gap from their opponents. By the final ten minutes they halved it.
And then, due to quick breaks, and what can I say, the courage that appeared was almost completely eliminated: after another “finishing off” from Martyuk, the score became 71:69 in favor of UNICS.
Perasovic, of course, took a time out, but it seems he was too late with this decision. It was already impossible to stop Lokomotiv-Kuban, so soon Burford put the hosts ahead for the first time in the match, and then Akun-Purcell secured victory for his team. Lokomotiv-Kuban won with a score of 82:75, marking the biggest comeback this season.
“The game lasts not 20 minutes, but 40,” Sekulic noted after the match. “We didn’t succeed in anything in the first half. We must pay tribute to the opponent, who very efficiently limited our strengths and, one might say, beat us with our own weapons – UNICS scored at least 15-18 points in the first half after quick breaks. But before the match there was an understanding that our bench was longer. We hoped it might work, and it did.” “Today we learned two lessons. The first is how not to play, especially in front of your own stands. And second: we understood how to play in the rest of the season. Honor and respect to our guys who were able to make such a comeback against a team of Euroleague level,” said the head coach of Lokomotiv-Kuban.
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