The match had barely begun when BJ Johnson opened the scoring with elegance, confusing the opponent’s defense with a Eurostep. However, it was the visitors who then began scoring without any difficulty – 2:6, then 4:9. At this point, Andrei Martyuk scored 4 points in a row, and then Johnson’s mini-benefit began. He scored against his previous team from under the hoop, from behind the 3-point line, from above… By the 8th minute, he had scored as many points as the entire PARMA team – 17:13 in favor of the hosts. Until the end of the quarter, Mikhail Vedischev also managed to score – 19:18.
In the 2nd quarter, Antonius Cleveland, who subsituted Johnson, also started scoring points at a rapid pace: he finished an alley-oop, hit two 3-pointers in a row, and on the third time did not throw, but made an assist to Martyuk. Cleveland scored 13 points very quickly, but Isaiah Whaley was no less useful in these minutes. He closed the Lokomotiv post with a lock: 3 steals, 1 block shot, plus smart exits from under PARMA’s high pressure.
The Krasnodar players caught a good mood: first, Patrick Miller gave a great assist to Vladislav Emchenko, a minute later a similar combination was played in the opposite direction.
But with the score 45:28, PARMA switched to the big five and began to defend much harder. In the final minutes of the quarter, the ball bounced out of the basket twice after shots from the home team, to which the visitors immediately responded with three-pointers – by the break it was already 47:42.
And at the beginning of the next ten minutes, it turned out that this was, in fact, a fine run by Evgeny Pashutin’s team: the Perm team completely blocked the opponent’s approaches to the ring. Lokomotiv couldn’t score for 5 minutes (6, if we count the end of the 2nd quarter), and PARMA took the lead – 52:47. It’s good that Cleveland managed to remove this groggy state by hitting the 3-pointer.
Then Yemchenko played several very good episodes: he scored a layup, immediately made an interception, then scored 2 free throws. Martyuk and Yemchenko once again set the score at the end of the quarter to 62:57 in favor of Lokomotiv.
When the game resumed, Alexander Zakharov and Royce Hamm scored a very difficult goal each, reducing their team’s deficit to 1 point. Loko was playing with the Russian five at that moment. And at some point the visitors even made “+3” in their favor. But Martyuk made a block shot, then fought good under the opponent’s hoop, a little later Vedishchev made a great pass to Anton Kvitkovskikh, and 30 seconds later he scored a 3-pointer – 65:64 for Lokomotiv.
Kirill Yelatontsev finally started scoring, Cleveland came out from the bench and scores 4 points. 2 minutes before the end it was “+7”. But PARMA did not give up: two consecutive hosts’ turnovers turned into accurate shots by Alex Hamilton and Garrett Navels, and a minute before the siren it turned out that we were in a very close clutch – 79:78 in favor of Loko.
Bad decision in the attack of the red-greens, and Hamilton puts his team ahead. In the counterattack, the Krasnodar team had 4 throws from under the ring, but the ball never fell into the net… Perhaps, Basket-Hall has not seen such a deafening home defeat since March 2023, when Nizhny Novgorod outran 8 points in the last minute.
Now Lokomotiv Kuban has two away games to play – November 10 in Astana and November 13 in Krasnoyarsk. We play at home on the 17th – against Avtodor.