Red-blue start and do not lose – Sport – Kommersant
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CSKA strengthened its leadership in the VTB United League regular season. On Sunday, the army team away in a tense confrontation, the outcome of which was decided in overtime, beat UNICS with a score of 95:93. CSKA, thus, showed the best start in its history in the league championship – the victory in Kazan was the team’s 14th in a row.
CSKA and UNICS, currently the two strongest teams in the VTB United League, have already met in the first round. But the Moscow match hopes that were pinned on him (and they expected a real battle with an unpredictable scenario from the game), by and large, did not justify. At that time, it was enough for CSKA to turn on the afterburner mode in the third quarter and then control the course of the game without any problems.
During the time that has passed since the Moscow match, both CSKA and UNICS did not know any misfires. But if Kazan still sometimes slipped a little, giving rivals some chances, then the army team left behind scorched earth, steadily gaining more than a hundred points in each match. And their average advantage in the last four meetings was an astounding 39 points.
Frightening, to be sure, the pace of the competitor in Kazan, however, did not impress.
UNICS started Sunday’s game strongly, resolving two closely related issues. Namely, he reduced the effectiveness of CSKA center Nikola Milutinov to an acceptable level and achieved a good game from his “big” Jalen Reynolds.
In the first Moscow-Kazan confrontation, he occasionally reminded himself of himself, but here he scored himself, and did not allow Milutinov to feel at ease. Daryl Macon and Stanislav Ilnitsky also got shots. We went in a series, and therefore CSKA, with its defense that suddenly became quite transparent, was already 11 points behind by the middle of the quarter.
Fortunately, such a beginning of the match did not harm the quality of the spectacle at all. CSKA calmly endured the missed blow and began to reduce the gap step by step. It turned out not that easy, but the army team has someone to take over the game. For example, Kasper Weir caused a lot of trouble for the Kazan team, not limiting himself to the role of a sniper that seemed to be assigned to him by nature itself (Wair’s height is only 178 cm), but managing to score in the paint, and even with fouls. And, of course, Alexey Shved, without whose hits and passes CSKA would not have succeeded.
As soon as the army team leveled the game, UNICS struck another blow. It seemed that the scenario of the first match was mirrored.
Only now, in the third quarter, the Kazan players switched to the enhanced power mode. Macon, Ilnitsky, tireless Reynolds organized another breakthrough for the hosts, and this time the advantage of UNICS reached 14 points at the moment. And it seemed to be a bid for victory. And the attempts of the mentor of the army team Emil Raikovich, who was forced to take time-outs, to find a combination that could stop the Kazan team, seemed doomed to failure. But Raikovich found the right combination.
Both Milutinov and the second “big” army man Livio Jean-Charles began to appear on the site at CSKA more and more often at the same time. With such an advantage in height and weight under the rings, it was already extremely difficult for UNICS to cope, and the game turned upside down again. Once again, CSKA returned to the game, and in the very end, after Ware accurately shot from a distance, it seemed that he even seized the initiative. But Reynolds’ answer of the same value followed immediately. The Swede responded with another three-pointer, and again UNICS equalized with the efforts of Anthony Brown. All this was within 40 seconds!
And it would even be a shame if such a match did without overtime. But he did not manage. In principle, the game deserved a couple of extra five minutes, but still the Shved factor (with 25 points in the asset he became the most productive player of the meeting) and Nikita Kurbanov’s amazingly timely awakened sniper talent tipped the scales in favor of the army team, who won with a score of 95 :93.
CSKA gave its best start in the history of the league (this victory was the 14th in a row) and strengthened its leadership in the championship, breaking away from UNICS already by two victories, and in head-to-head matches.
The absolute record set in the 2013/14 season by Khimki (18 wins in a row) is still a long way off, but with such a game, the army team can beat it by mid-January.
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