Roman Semerninov, who replaced Andrey Vedishchev as the head coach of Loko for this game, said the day before that the most important thing would be the motivation. And already at the warm-up, Patrick Miller showed his grit.
Kirill Temirov quickly opened the scoring, but the opponent willingly picked up the high tempo. Astana center Andrey Desyatnikov had a brilliant stretch ‒ the tallest player in the league (220 cm!) finished the alley-oop from Rustam Murzagaliev, then fought successfully three opponents under the hoop and hammered in a dunk. Then Danila Pokhodyaev got involved: a mid-range shot, a three-pointer, a dunk… But Lokomotiv still constantly remained ahead ‒ due to offensive variety of attacks and the sniper courage of Isaiah Whaley, who began to score from any distance. As a result, by the first break Krasnodar was leading 27:24.
The first minute of the 2nd quarter witnessed a hurricane-like exchange of accurate shots: Ruslan Aitkali scored 3 points, Anton Kvitkovskikh scored 4. And then Kirill Yelatontsev scored from afar ‒ and started Lokomotiv’s run. Whaley joined the challenge called “threes by bigs” and scored this way 3 times before the big break.
The Krasnodar players noticeably felt free: Miller scored 2+1, Karvel Anderson succeeded with several mid-range throws, Miller and Antonius Cleveland played a very aesthetic counterattack. By the end of the quarter, Loko’s lead was already big ‒ 55:38.
After the change of sides, Loko continued to score approximately x1.5 more than the hosts. Temirov brought his team several points in a row, Miller made in two 3-pointers within 28 seconds, Cleveland took three rebounds in one attack, Dmitry Uzinsky and Vladislav Yemchenko scored their first points this day. All the aforementioned helped Lokomotiv increase the gap even more – 74:53.
The outcome of the game ceased to be a concern after Yemchenko scored from the perimeter in the 32nd minute – 78:56. Lokomotiv coaches sent Danil Sheyanov out to gain practice, and the captain of the reserve team worked hard for his minutes: he scored 7 points in a row, hitting the basket without a miss, and when he missed at some point, Yelatontsev put the ball back. As a result, Sheyanov scored 10 points.
By the penultimate minute, the guests had a chance to score 100 points. Astana resisted this desperately, but Uzinsky still managed to finish one of the attacks with a dunk – it turned out to be a hundred minus 1 point, but much more important is the fact that the victory that was expected from Lokomotiv was achieved without excessive stress.
Now Lokomotiv Kuban is heading to Perm, where on February 12 they will play against PARMA, the only opponent they have not yet been able to defeat.
By the way, yesterday Lokomotiv-2 (which had exactly the same problem with the Perm team) finally managed to beat PARMA-M. The main team has someone to follow as an example!