Somehow it turned out that this season there are two Unicaja. One barely crawls on the standings, barely making her way into the Top 16 and sometimes missing out on victories in favorable matches. Another, packed with Spanish "collections - world champions, Argentinean Pepe Sanchez - the Olympic champion, a set of respectable veterans and an eminent coach, won five consecutive Euroleague fights by Wednesday evening.
Coach Sergio Scariolo hardly indulged in such global conclusions, telling at a press conference about the two faces of the game under the arches of the arena in Krylatsky. He said that after a great start the team experienced a shock, lost clarity of ideas and woke up, got rid of fear only during the break. Well this is how to scare the champions of Spain!
Dynamo tried. At first, giving the guests a brief initiative, the blue and white scrambled out in the usual straightforward manner - handing the ball to Lazaros Papadopoulos and watching what Lazarus could do. The Greek center got used to the role of the magic wand and attacked with the shamelessness of permissiveness, having thrown the ring more than a dozen times in the first quarter and frightened out opponents in the three-second zone.
But the cunning Ivkovich prepared surprises. It was then that Dusan habitually wept about ruthless personnel problems brazenly trampling his coaching concept, and under the arches of the arena they showed the sad treatment of the injured Travis Hansen. But the prettiest part of the game was an experimental one, when five holders of Russian passports were on the site at once - together with the Greek Papadopoulos, Khvostov, Bykov, Monya and Vasiliev were running. This combination was struck by a crazy dedication. It was he who managed to grow his advantage to the fantastic “+20” and put him on a “jar” with four fouls of the legendary Puerto Rican center-bespectacled Daniel Santiago.
Then no one could have imagined that the game was just beginning. While the shaman Skariolo, with unknown passes, drove fear out of the wards' souls, Ivkovich listened to strange information that Antonios Fotsis was practically unable to move! This was still not enough for the injured ones in the collection ... I had to release Monya in the fourth position, and he worked a little, quickly fouled.
But the replacements at Unicaja turned out to be very successful. “Big” Marco Tushek and Inaki De Miguel almost turned off Papadopoulos from the game and began to pick up those bounces that at first fell to jumping Fotsis. And then, fortunately, a throw from Bernie Rodriguez erupted, which began to put one “three” in the ring after another. The lag was closing so rapidly that Ivkovich seemed to have no time to digest the bulk of the information. With a couple of timeouts during the third quarter (lost 19:36!), He was late for three or four possessions with each. Even the author of these lines, not claiming a deep understanding of gambling psychology, folded his hands in the letter "T" much earlier.
As a result, everything turned out not very beautiful. Equalizing the score and even stepping forward, “Unicaja” was beaten “straight in the jaw”. For almost a quarter and a half, the agitated Dynamo existed solely due to the individual skill of the players - able to crawl under the shield in spite of everyone Dean, Popovich, Domani and Gill released only in the end of the third quarter.
These guys stayed heroically until the last minutes, Popovich and the “thawed” Fotsis, taking advantage of Scariolo’s later defensive mistakes, put a couple of “three” in the target, and then, using accuracy in the first seven minutes of the final quarter, Dynamo fought hard to defend. The heroic face of Unicaja bruised and asked for mercy ...
Nikolai TSYNKEVICH