VTB League President Sergey Kushchenko, after the opening League games, noted MBA and Samara games and the main League trends.
Samara has not revealed the potential yet
There are many factors that did not allow Samara to properly prepare for the game with CSKA and unleash the potential of the team. First of all, legionnaires are coming to the team shortly before the start of the season. Although, for example, James Ennis was fine – you can feel a lot of experience playing in the NBA, where there are also a lot of flights and jet lag.
In addition, CSKA game was well-coordinated at high speeds from the first minutes. With Shved and Davidovac, the Army team showed a completely different basketball than in the preseason. And Samara was not ready for this. It seemed that Sergey Bazarevich did not act in his style either – he carried out a large rotation even when one of the players found his game. At the same time, young Umrikhin and Barashkov played well.
MBA players are motivated
MBA has a lot of youth players who want to prove themselves.
Both in pre-season games and in Krasnodar, MBA already had Vasily Karasev style of play. The emphasis is on the players who want to prove their worth – and this is perhaps the best motivation in the game.
Loko was not bad in the SuperCup, showed a high-quality game against Zenit, but MBA defense stopped the Krasnodar team, which we saw before the start of the season. In fact, Loko faced a very aggressive defense, which was issued by motivated MBA players. Lopatin was extremely motivated, he got only few minutes in CSKA, Valiev made a lot of great decisions. And in general, all the players coming out on the floor showed a great desire to fight and win.
About the new season
I think that if the top teams of the League had been equipped for European tournaments, then our teams newcomers would have experienced more serious problems at the start. But this is just the beginning, the season is long. The number of games will be approximately the same as in European tournaments. Therefore, the first round will show the style of the teams, help the scouts to analyze the newcomers. The VTB League starts an interesting season with cool basketball.
