Another two-legged confrontation between the northern and southern capitals began with a crushing defeat of the rivals of the basketball club «Astana». The renewed composition of the «Almaty Legion» did not withstand the pressure of the capital squad, and our guys updated the season record in terms of the score difference. At the same time, Emil Raikovich announced only Kazakh players for the match.
The scoring in this game was opened by Robert Pan, who earned the first six points not only for our team, but in general. “Almaty Legion” scored five points in five minutes of the game, but were already losing 10. The capital team did not stop and completely dominated the game. At the last minute of the first period, Vadim Shcherbak “broke” the twenty-point line in our advantage, and the whole quarter ended with the score — 34:13 in our favor. In the second quarter, the capital's control did fade away, although the overall performance worsened. The “Almaty Legion” simply had nothing to oppose to the more experienced “Astana” and, their lag, increased every minute. In the seventh minute of the period, Dmitry Gavrilov brought the gap to 30 points. And already the final score in the first quarter was set by Maksim Marchuk — 57:20.
Immediately after fifteen-minute break, Rustam Murzagaliyev brought Astana's advantage to forty points. And by the middle of the third period the difference after Maxim Marchuk's shot it exceeded to fifty points. In the third quarter Almaty team scored 11 points, and our team scored ten more points — 21 points. Before the final quarter the difference between the teams was huge — 78:31. Andrey Litvinenko in the fourth quarter immediately increased to fifty points of advantage for the capital team. The “Almaty Legion” did everything they could in this game, but the level of the teams was completely different. Four minutes before the end, Nikolay Bazhin brought the capital's team's advantage to 60 points, and a minute later he also scored one hundred and first points in our team's favour in this game. The last points in this game were scored by Anton Ponomarev. Initially, it was clear that the teams' rosters are different in terms of training and experience, but the rules are rules “Astana” defeated “Almaty Legion” with a score of 109: 41
Consequences: “Astana” is hardly threatened by anything on the first line of the standings, and “Legion” after this defeat lost a line and went down to the fourth.
Most productive:
- “Astana” - all our players who entered the court in this match scored points. Most of all, Robert Pan scored 21 points and 8 rebounds. Anton Ponomarev earned a double-double — 13 points, 7 rebounds, 10 assists and 3 steals. Ruslan Aitkali has 14 points and 8 rebounds; 12 points, 5 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 steals from Nikolay Bazhin and 17 points from Vadim Shcherbak.
- “Almaty Legion” — Daniel Albrant became the best of the opponent, who earned a double-double today — 16 points, 10 rebounds and 2 block shots.
Next match: The second game of the series with “Almaty Legion” will take place tomorrow, January 27, also in Shchuchinsk at the site of the sports base “Zhaksy 2”. The match starts at 15:00 Nur-Sultan time. The online broadcast of the game will be available on the home page of our website and on our
YouTube channel.
Detailed information about the tournament, tournament tables, schedule and match results are published in the
Tournaments section.
