UNICS beat Zenit in a basketball match
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In the central match of the week of the VTB United League regular championship, the current tournament champion UNICS hosted the winner of the season before last, Zenit. The game did not turn out to be the most productive, but this did not in any way lack a beautiful intrigue, which was resolved only in the last seconds of the meeting. The Kazan team turned out to be luckier, winning with a score of 64:61.
UNICS and Zenit approached their second head-to-head meeting this season (the Kazan team won the first in St. Petersburg, although they almost allowed their opponent to turn the match around in the final ten minutes), with almost equal performance. UNICS, which was in second place, was ahead of Zenit, which was in third, only in terms of additional indicators, so that in the next Kazan-St. Petersburg confrontation, a place in the top 2 of the championship was at stake. Let it be intermediate. Nevertheless, at least for the Kazan team this was the most important match. The team has already misfired twice in a row, losing successively to Yenisei and Parma. A third loss in a row, especially in a confrontation with a fundamental rival (it is noteworthy that in the last season and the season before last, the winner of the semi-final pair UNICS-Zenit became the league champion), could have a very negative impact on the condition of the Kazan team. Psychological first of all. But perhaps it was the feeling of increased responsibility for the result that influenced not only UNICS, but also Zenit. As a result, teams that average more than 80 points per match barely surpassed the 60 point mark this time.
The fact that one should not expect any performance records from the game became clear already at the beginning: in the first ten minutes the opponents scored only 30 points between them.
It’s hard to say why, but UNICS and Zenit, who have no shortage of shooting players, didn’t have those same shots.
It would be nice if there were misses from a distance, but even the routine two-point attempts did not reach the goal. UNICS had a two-point conversion percentage per game of 45, while Zenit slightly exceeded the 36 mark.
However, the game, despite everything, was still watchable. Primarily due to the fact that it was marked by at least three sharp changes in vectors. First, Sergei Karasev and Adrien Moerman suddenly remembered that they were throwing well, and gave Zenit an 8:0 breakthrough, which allowed the guests to go to the long break with the score 35:28. In another situation, such a difference might not have been particularly noticeable by the middle of the match, but in the extremely sticky game that the teams forced on each other, a 7-point lead was perceived as all 15.
But after the break, UNICS began to achieve something in attack. This time the Kazan team had long-range attempts: Louis Laberie adjusted the aim, and the game leveled off, and soon Dmitry Kulagin, Eric Green and Nenad Dimitrievich continued the breakthrough. It seemed that after this they secured victory for their team. But Zenit somehow miraculously pulled the match into the end. Here we cannot fail to note the interception by Trent Fraser that happened at the most important moment and the three-pointer he immediately scored. As a result, a minute before the final whistle, the advantage of the Kazan team was only one point – 62:61. And Zenit had a chance for at least overtime, and at most for victory. However, the guests’ attack did not produce results, and the Kazan team scored the decisive goal almost before the siren – 64:61 in favor of UNICS.
“In my opinion, today’s match corresponded to the level of the Euroleague,” UNICS head coach Velimir Perasovich noted after the game. “Both teams played hard and intensely, on the verge of a foul. We were preparing for such a high level and such quality of play. I’m happy that we were able to find a way to prevail in this confrontation.” In turn, Zenit coach Javi Pascual noted that “any of the teams could have won today.” “We controlled the match for two and a half quarters. However, unfortunately, we played the last 8-9 minutes too poorly and completely lost control of the game on offense, allowing UNICS to take the lead. We managed to come back, we had the opportunity to win, but in the end we couldn’t do it,” he said.
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