A regular season game will in Poland on Monday.
Monday, February 14
Zielona Gora (Poland) — Zenit (Russia)
Time: 19:00 (21:00 Moscow time)
Location: Poland, Zelena Góra, CRS Hala Zielona Góra
Broadcast: TV Start, League website
Rivalry history: 6 games, Zenit — 6 wins
Zielona Gora: At the end of January, Gora were finally able to break their loosing streak, which already consisted of 6 defeats in a row, beating Astana— their closest competitor. This win has not yet helped the Polish team to leave the last place, but left Oliver Vidin’s team the opportunity to compete for the 8th place. So far, in the history of face-to-face games with Zenit, the Poles have not yet won. This season, they lost in the 1st round 17 points without much chance of success. Then Gora could not do anything against Sergey Karasev, who played his best game in this regular season: in 23 minutes, the St. Petersburg team forward scored 25 points, which was his personal best for the last 4 seasons.
Zenit: The St. Petersburg team continue to be haunted by injuries — they played the Euroleague game against Alba without Arturas Gudaitis, Conner Frankamp and Mateusz Ponitka. Zenit have less than 3 days to recover and prepare for departure to Poland. And already on February 17, that is, 3 days later, Zenit will have a trip to Belarus, where the team will play versus Tsmoki. Moreover, even a 3-week break in the domestic championship will not relieve Zenit too much — from February 25 to March 3 they will play 3 times in the Euroleague, and one of the games will be in Israel.
What to follow: in the November game, Zenit set a team’s best in 3-pointers made – 18. The St. Petersburg team has not managed to repeat this result yet — they got closest to the record in a winning game with Avtodor (14 3-pointers). This was also an almost exceptional case for Zielona Gora: in recent games, even the leaders of the UNICS League, CSKA and Avtodor failed to hit the ring of Zielona Gora from the 3-point line more than 10 times.
