Nizhny break Loko’s streak, PARMA is in Top-5, 6 teams have 7 wins. Week in review

Nizhny break Loko’s streak, PARMA is in Top-5, 6 teams have 7 wins. Week in review

Regular season ends in two months!

Lokomotiv was stopped in Nizhny

This week Loko extended the contract with Evgeny Pashutin for 3 more seasons. And they had all the ground for it: under his coaching they managed to hit super winning streak of 8 victories, they haven’t lost a single game since the middle of December and caught up with CSKA in the table.

They had to slow down in Nizhny Novgorod. Zoran Lukic team beat one of the season’s leaders while fighting for play-offs. Even though, Loko had a little lead in the first half of the game, after a half break Nizhny dictated their game, making Loko to take it back.

In a search for a perfect line-up Zoran Lukic released all 12 players on the court, even including 17 years old Mikhail Belenitskiy – young forward made a debut in the League and even collected an offensive rebound.

But Nizhny won led by their leaders: Astapkovich, Antipov and Brown scored 47 points combined and helped their team to stop Loko. Anton Astapkovich has become a hero of the game, as well as the top-scorer with 18 points:

Astana break unpleasant tradition in Krasnoyarsk

Probably, Astana is the most home team this season. Until the 1 of March, 5 of their 6 wins were gained in Nur-Sultan, while on the road they won only once out of 8 games.

Also, games in Krasnoyarsk historically were not lucky for Astana: they won only once in 2014 (83:81). What’s interesting, only 3 players of that team are now playing in the League – Pavel Sergeev and Evgeniy Kolesnikov from UNICS and Khimki’s guard Viacheslav Zaitcev.

This Sunday Astana managed to stop this tradition. Guests quickly recovered from being down by 7 at the beginning of the game, and in the second half they showed decent defence – Enisey was able to score only 25 points in 20 minutes. 64 points is a new record for the Astana’s defence.

PARMA capture the 5th place

In the middle of the tour, the table looked incredible: after the success of Astana in Krasnoyarsk 7 League teams had 7 wins each – and this is a month and a half before the end of the regular season!

But this situation haven’t lasted long: PARMA have beaten Zielona Gora and with the record of 8-10 for the first time in its history climbed to 5th place in the table. The Polish team was defeated via three-pointer: PARMA repeated the season-high in shots from behind the arc (15) and showed the best percentage for this stat in the season (39%).

The victory was a major one – 91:76, but the head coach of PARMA Kazys Maxvytis was still not completely satisfied. The fact is that in the first game between these teams, Zielona Gora won with a difference of 18 points (106:88), and in case of equal stats at the end of the regular season, it will be the Poles who are higher in the table.

Good news for PARMA fans is that their team gained a decent momentum in 2020: after the New Year, they won 5 of their 6 games. The victory over Zielona Gora was the first for Parma in the history of the games between these clubs.

Avtodor gets first victory in 2020

In mid-December, Avtodor beat Nizhny Novgorod and settled in the play-off zone, but 7 losses in a row pushed them to the last but one place. This made the club management to make serious changes: Donaldas Kairys became the head coach of Avtodor instead of Predrag Krunic.

The black streak was stopped in the home game against Tsmoki: Avtodor showed us their best game offensively, they have scored 109 points which is season-high and took the first victory in 2020. By help of this win they avoided falling to last place and returned to the race for the play-offs: Avtodor is now only 2 victories away from the 6th place.

It is interesting that Donaldas Kairys won his first game against his former team: he was at the head of Tsmoki when he made his debut in the United League in the 2013/14 season.

UNICS take revenge for first round beating Kalev

Kalev became one of the main newsmakers at the start of the season: via win over UNICS and Zenit Tallinn kept Top-3 spot for some time.

UNICS couldn’t not recall their rivals big 22-point loss: after first half of the Saturday game in Kazan the hosts led by 20 – 54:34.

After the big break Kalev tried to make a comeback, which was immediately stopped by duo Smith-McCollum. That evening UNICS American guards’ duo was unstoppable: 36 points and 7/12 threes combined.

After this win UNICS settled on the fourth place. Of course, Kazan have almost no chances to catch up with Loko or even CSKA, but if Kalev lost they could let the 7-team group get to close to them. Now, the distance to 5th place is comfortable 3 wins.

All-VTB United League of the week

The competition in standings

2019/20 season is the most competitive in terms of standings. 7 weeks before the end of the season and only 3 teams clinched the play-offs – Khimki,CSKA and Loko. Teams from 5th to 11th place have 7 wins and even Avtodor and Tmoski still have chances to make top-8 after the regular season!