MBA got the first win in the League against Lokomotiv Kuban in Krasnodar — 86:73 (23:19, 18:13, 24:19, 21:22).
The best scorers
Lokomotiv Kuban: Jaylen Barford (23), Anton Kvitkovskikh (12 + 6 rebounds), Darral Willis (6 + 10 rebounds)
MBA: Andrey Lopatin (17 + 6 rebounds), Evgeniy Valiev (16 + 9 rebounds), Ilya Platonov (16+ 7 rebounds), Alexandr Khomenko (11)
Game progress
Like Samara, MBA also made the VTB League debut on Monday. Loko looked like a good opponent for the Moscow team. But the guests accepted the challenge with dignity. After spending a time on adaptation, they confidently took over the initiative from the middle of the first quarter. Advantage on rebounds (rebounds: 16-11) and Evgeniy Valiev offensive plays (8 points) allowed the League newcomers to win the first quarter – 23:19.
Alexandr Khomenko became the key player at the start of the second quarter. MBA guard scored twice and assisted to Andrey Lopatin three-pointer. A 7:0 run allowed the guests to get a double-digit lead – 30:19. Loko tried to come back to the game. But poor three-shooting percentage (25% — 4 out of 16) did not allow them to significantly reduce the difference. MBA players had a 9 points lead before the halftime — 41:32.
The third quarter showed new heroes of MBA. Andrey Lopatin and Timofey Yakushin duo scored 14 points and the lead of the guests in the middle of the quarter was 19 points — 57:38. Lokomotiv could not reply for such performance and even Anton Kvitkovskikh made half-court shot did not help to get close to the opponent before the final quarter.
The Moscow team confidently controlled second half of the game and got the confident win.
Hero
Evgeny Valiev was MBA leader today. The bigman almost got a double-double (16 points + 9 rebounds) and at the same time became the most effective player of the game (27).
Numbers
73 — defense was the key success for MBA in this game. The guests allowed Loko to make only 34.8% of shots from the game (23 out of 66), which is the worst among all teams at the start of this season.
Comments
Alexander Sekulic, Lokomotiv Kuban Head Coach:
– Too much has gone wrong: the defense, the offense. We allowed them to score easy points. At first, we built up the offense well, created open shots – but did not score, which caused nervousness, which began to lead to bad decisions. If our scoring percentage were higher, we could well impose a more serious competition to the opponent. Congratulations to MBA – they got a great game. They punished us very good for the lack of rebounds. We did not succeed in this at all. The win was made by aggressive defense and offensive rebounds.
Vasily Karasev, MBA Head Coach:
– It’s very good that we won this game. This give players the confidence – they will understand that they can beat the top teams. I will praise our coaching staff: they sorted out the opponent well, they hit the points they were going to hit. Today’s win is a reward to the players for the very hard work they have done. It is clear that it is difficult to draw conclusions from one game, but we are definitely happy with this game.
What’s next
Lokomotiv Kuban: home game versus Samara on October 8.
MBA: road game against Astana on October 9.
