Lokomotiv Kuban beat Astana at home – 73:53 (23-17, 17-8, 22-13, 11-15).
The best scorers:
Lokomotiv Kuban: Darral Willis (22 + 11 rebounds), Andrey Martiuk (15 + 7 rebounds), Jaylen Barford (15)
Astana: Daniil Aksenov (13)
Game progress
Loko returned home after a two-week absence in 9th place in the standings with 2-4. Astana got its only win in 6 games at home.
At the start of the game, the Kazakh team had problems in offense: Astana could not score points for more than 2 minutes, but Loko almost immediately took the lead. But it didn’t work out for the Krasnodar team: the guests quickly established combinations and caught up the opponent and Daniil Aksenov made shot at the end allowed them to equalize the score. Until the very end of the quarter, the teams made shots and only closer to the end Loko slightly increased the lead – 23:17. The hero of the first quarter was Darral Willis: the forward played this quarter without substitutions, scoring 13 points and 3 rebounds.
But in the second quarter, Astana began to miss: for almost 7 minutes, the guests had 22 points scored, letting the opponents has a double-digit lead. Zakhar Vedishchev made shot before the halftime gave Loko 15-point lead – 40:25. Turnovers became a big problem for Astana: Oleg Kiselev team could not establish ball control in any way and made 15 turnovers in the first half.
The fate of the game was decided already in the third quarter: Jaylen Barford and Darral Willis brought the Krasnodar team lead to 20 points and Kirill Elatontsev made 4 points in a row in the end of the quarter. The last quarter started with the score 62:38 and became a formality – Astana could no make a comeback in 10 minutes.
Hero
Darral Willis. The forward became the best scorer of the game with 22 points with a good shooting percentage: 8 out of 12 from the game, 2 out of 3 three-pointers. Willis also had 11 rebounds, 2 assists and 1 steal.
Numbers
22 – a large number of turnovers did not allow Astana to show the offensive potential this season.
What’s next
Lokomotiv Kuban: road game against Avtodor on November 6
Astana: home gmae versus Enisey on November 5
