VTB United League Championship starts

The VTB United League championship starts on Saturday, which will have a different format and a larger number of participants. But its main feature is the unpredictability of the outcome of the fight for victory in the championship. There are four top participants in the tournament, as before: UNICS, Lokomotiv-Kuban, Zenit and CSKA. But it is completely impossible to predict which of them will come out on top. It is possible that the 2023/24 season will be the best in the history of the league.

Russian sports, which fell into isolation after the events in Ukraine, are coping with difficulties in different ways. But if we talk specifically about the VTB United League, then its excommunication from the Euroleague and the European Cup, oddly enough, even benefited it. The paradoxical positive aspects of isolation appeared back in the 2021/22 season. Along the way, Russian teams were excluded from European Cup competitions, many high-quality foreign players left the VTB United League teams, but those who remained had an excellent playoff, crowned by a final series previously unprecedented in Russian basketball. In it, Zenit interrupted CSKA’s long-term hegemony in the seventh match. A year later it turned out even better. Yes, the final, in which UNICS and Lokomotiv-Kuban competed, was not as good as the year before (Kazan won with a score of 4:1), but there were two crazy semi-finals (UNICS – Zenit and CSKA – Lokomotiv -Kuban”), who survived until the seventh matches.

All this against the backdrop of maintaining the generally pre-isolation level of play demonstrated by the teams. It’s not surprising given that, according to data released by the league last week, clubs’ budgets have shrunk, but not so much that they are forced to make drastic sacrifices in player quality. Yes, CSKA’s expenses last season decreased by 666 million rubles compared to the year before. (from 2.808 billion to 2.142 billion rubles), and wage costs fell from 1.498 billion to 868 million rubles. But, for example, Zenit spent 772 million rubles on players during its championship season, and 679 million rubles last season. UNICS and Lokomotiv-Kuban’s expenses have changed little at all. Kazan residents spent 1.201 billion rubles during the season, Krasnodar residents – 1.366 billion rubles. At the same time, both UNICS and Lokomotiv-Kuban invested relatively modestly in the maintenance of their squads, spending 478 million and 493 million rubles. accordingly, which did not differ much from the indicators of the season before last.

Judging by the activity of VTB United League clubs in the transfer market and which players they retained for the new season, there is no point in talking about a drop in the quality of the basketball product this time either. It’s not for nothing that the league’s leadership, skeptical about the desire of new teams to join it, agreed to its expansion. In the new season, 14 teams will compete in the tournament, two more than last year. Moscow’s Runa and Yekaterinburg’s Uralmash joined the championship. The structure of the tournament will also change somewhat. Like a season earlier, the regular season will be held in three stages. At the first stage, all teams will play a two-round tournament. At the second stage, the top 6 clubs of the first stage (they will automatically receive tickets to the play-offs) will form Group A, in which they will play another two-round tournament. The remaining teams will be in Group B and will also play a two-round tournament. The main change compared to last season is that there will be a play-in stage for Group B. In the last championship, the two strongest teams of Group B made it to the play-offs. In the next tournament, the teams that took places from seventh to tenth will hold play-offs, in which the two missing play-off participants will be determined. The play-in format is as follows: the seventh-place team plays the eighth-place team. The winner of the pair advances to the play-offs. The loser meets the winner of the match between the teams that took ninth and tenth places. The winner again advances to the playoffs. In the play-off series of the first round there will be up to three victories, semi-finals and finals – up to four. But the series for third place, which last season was held up to four victories, was decided to be shortened. Bronze will be played out in a “three-victory” series.

If we talk about the favorites of the starting tournament, then Zenit seems to be the main one at the moment. The St. Petersburg team, which retained the core of last year’s team, has three important reinforcements – Kyle Kuric, Bojan Dubljevic and Vince Hunter (the latter is also a factor in weakening the competitor, since he moved from UNICS). Kuric can shoot especially brightly. Five years ago he already played for Zenit, then moved to Barcelona and now he has decided to return. And this seems to be a truly powerful acquisition. At the recent VTB United League Super Cup, it was Kuric who largely secured the title for his team and the title of MVP of the tournament for himself.

The outcome of the VTB United League Super Cup at the moment is perhaps the only effective indicator of teams’ readiness for the season. And one cannot fail to note the state in which Lokomotiv-Kuban approached him. The Krasnodar team had brilliant victories over CSKA and one of the top Euroleague clubs, Fenerbahçe, and, if they had been a little luckier, they would have defeated Zenit in the final. And all this is mainly due to the efforts of purely Russian players. It seems that club president Andrei Vedishchev’s bet on home-grown personnel (Alexander Shcherbenev, Vladislav Yemchenko, Anton Kvitkovskikh, Zakhar Vedishchev) is working great.

The current champion UNICS enters the season in an ambiguous state. The Kazan team did not show a championship game in the Super Cup, dropping out of the competition after the first match (defeat from Nizhny Novgorod). But here it should be noted that Kazan head coach Velimir Perasovich played with a truncated rotation, actually up to eight basketball players, and, even despite this, had a chance of reaching the next round. After all, UNICS’ lineup certainly hasn’t become weaker, and the same Nenad Dimitrievich, without whom UNICS won’t see the title, is still effective. Yes, as already mentioned, Hunter left for Zenit, but his place was taken by the Belgian “big man” Ismael Bako. And the place of Georgy Zhbanov, who also moved to Zenit, was taken by Dmitry Kulagin, who followed the opposite route. It seems that Perasovich simply does not force the team’s preparation, trying to get it in the right shape at the right time.

Well, the mystery team of the season is probably CSKA, which was hard to imagine just a year ago. The army team, which lost Nikola Milutinov, Alexey Shved, Dallas Moore, Dejan Davidovac, and Devonte Keycock in the offseason, as their head coach Emil Raikovich said earlier, is changing their game plan and switching to “defense and fight.” Previously, CSKA’s style of play boiled down to the desire to simply crush the enemy with power and a constant advantage in rotation. But so far the transition to the new scheme is not going too well for Raikovich. At the same Super Cup, CSKA dropped out of the fight for the main prize after the first match, losing to Lokomotiv-Kuban by only two points. However, out of 98 points scored by the army team, 44 were chalked up by Casper Ware. And in the match against Besiktas, which was also lost, Ware scored 41 points. With such a load on one player, it’s not easy to count on a smooth season.

Alexander Petrov