The teams started the game in a very fast pace: already in the 3rd minute, Lokomotiv was leading 11:6, and during this time, Anton Kvitkovskikh and Andrei Martyuk made spectacular dunks, and Vsevolod Ishchenko ‒ a cold-blooded three-pointer.
Pari NN stopped keeping up this tempo and gradually began to lag behind. As soon as the equator of the 1st quarter was passed, Patrick Miller set the scoreboard to 19:10 in a fast break. Thanks to the efforts of Aubrey Dawkins and Nemanja Đurišić, the hosts pulled up the score a little, but two consecutive blocks by Kirill Yelatontsev were converted into points by Antonius Cleveland and Mikhail Vedishchev. And Vladislav Yemchenko score a buzzer once again – 26:19 in favor of Lokomotiv after the 1st ten minutes.
Then, despite a spectacular breakthrough by Cleveland and a 3-pointer by Kirill Temirov, Pari NN managed to level the game. Veterans Evgeny Baburin and Dmitry Khvostov, who were playing their 299th game together (a good number of which, in the 2016/17 and 2017/18 seasons, they played for Lokomotiv), both scored from afar. But with the score 36:31 in favor of the Krasnodar team, the hosts’ bench got a technical foul ‒ and B.J. Johnson and then Ishchenko returned the gap to 8 points.
The speed at which the red-greens acted forced Pari NN players to foul a lot: by the big break, Lokomotiv made 25 free throws ‒ as many as the team averages per game this season. Nevertheless, by the big break, the Nizhny Novgorod team got quite close, 44:40 for Loko.
After the game resumed, Miller, Martyuk and Ishchenko helped Lokomotiv make a 6:2 run. But now the Krasnodar players started fouling a lot, and 50:42 soon turned into 50:46.
Johnson caught his sniper streak just in time, scoring 6 points in two attacks. But in the third, the referees interpreted BJ’s actions as flopping and issued the Lokomotiv forward a technical foul, which turned out to be his fourth, so the visiting coaches decided to spare their most productive player of the evening and substituted him. Cleveland came out and scored 4 points in a row, finally making the advantage in the score double-digit, 60:49!
“And-one” from Martyuk, 2 more points from Cleveland, a shot from Yelatontsev from under the hoop – and now it’s 68:51. But Pari NN showed character: long-range shots from Baburin and Alexander Chadov made the score 70:60 by the last break.
Попытки хозяев броситься в погоню на протяжении первой половины 4-й четверти The hosts’ attempts to start a chase in the 4th quarter were stopped confidently and unconditionally. Dmitry Uzinsky scored from afar, Miller – in a tense contact, Martyuk and Cleveland – from the mid-range. And when Vsevolod Ishchenko scored 2+1 two and a half minutes before the siren and made the score 87:70, the only questions left in this match were “will the red-greens reach 100 points?”
It didn’t happen – but it hardly upset either the players or the Krasnodar fans (who, by the way, were present in the stands of the Nagorny arena). This is the 9th victory in a row for Loko – a new club record (the previous achievement was 3 wins at the start of the season).
Lokomotiv Kuban will play their next game on Sunday. And this will probably be the most difficult game since the start of the championship – away against CSKA. The game starts at 13:00.