In their final match at the group World Cup basketball tournament, the Russian team met with the national team of Venezuela. Both rivals had no tangible tournament motivation. In this regard, the coaches were not going to unnecessarily overload their wards, who, after a few weeks, will have to start playing in the regular season.
Against this background, in such meetings, fans most often have to get bored, with those rare exceptions when two teams that focus on the attack, arrange crazy shootings without regard to their own ring. But neither the domestic squad, nor the Venezuelan team are among those: the effectiveness of the attack was their weakness in the Middle Kingdom, where the Russians and Latinos did not score an average of 75 points per game.
Both teams had to fight only for their own prestige - and try to enjoy their final match at the world championship, which for veterans of both teams may be the last in a professional career. In particular, this concerns Vitaly Fridzon, who celebrates his 34th birthday a month later. It is unlikely that the prospect of taking a higher place in the interval from the ninth to the 16th really excited the minds of athletes and their coaches: such things are more important for extras, journalists and ordinary basketball enthusiasts.
There was nothing more to fight for - opponents were selected in advance for the 2020 Olympics qualification in advance, while they had already lost the chance to get to Tokyo directly. After all, both Europe and America will be represented in the playoffs of the World Cup by at least two other teams, and only four tickets to the Japanese capital in China will be played.
Therefore, to start playing their best basketball, the Russians needed 22 frankly unsuccessful minutes and an emotional timeout from Sergei Bazarevich in the debut of the third quarter. During it, usually a very calm specialist gave vent to the accumulated negative emotions, and he had reasons for this. So, for the entire first half, the domestic squad realized just five shots from the game and scored 27 points. Fortunately, domestic athletes practiced on defense, while Venezuela categorically did not fly from a long distance.
Due to this, the rivals went on a long break with an equal score, although in the starting segment Vorontsevich and the company had a pleasing eye "+11". Venezuela managed to step forward briefly and only six points. Just in the debut of the third ten-minute. As part of the Hispanics this evening, Michael Carrera and Hornan Zamora shone. The first of them designed a double-double of 19 points and ten rebounds, and the second - chalked up three of the four exact three-point teams.
After three relatively easy hits worth two points from the opponent, the coaching staff of the Russians still managed to clean up among domestic basketball players and find combinations that would be equally useful on their own and on the other side of the court. They turned out to be several unexpected people: most of the second half of the reporting match, the position of the point guard was closed by Grigory Motovilov, while the front line was strengthened by Evgeny Valiev, who worked for the second best score in the team “+11” in 11-plus minutes of playing time.
Two “bombs” from behind the arc of Andrei Vorontsevich, partially rehabilitated for his own failures on the perimeter in previous meetings, and the activity of Nikita Kurbanov made a radical change in the game. In a number of episodes, the forward of CSKA boldly took the initiative and achieved the result with the help of one-on-one defeats and the ability to squeeze out two free throws from a difficult situation. For three, the army team and Motovilov built 41 points, almost 60% of the total team 69, and sent 12 of the 20 Russian attacks from the game to the target - and 10 of them fell in the second half.
Having given the Russians the initiative at the end of the third quarter, the Venezuelans were completely bogged down in the defenses of Bazarevich, and even a huge advantage in the struggle for selection (18: 9) did not help them avoid defeat. Not once in the entire final segment of the meeting did the Russian team let the opponent get closer than two possessions, and began the final 60 seconds of regular time with a comfortable handicap of nine points.
The siren recorded the success of Russian basketball players with a score of 69:60. Perhaps he was not very important from a tournament point of view, but encouraging after a fiasco in a duel with the Poles two days ago, when all hopes of reaching the quarter-finals were lost. Nevertheless, the impressions of the tournament were still controversial. Wards Bazarevich confidently completed the minimum task in the form of an exit in the second group round, however, they presented a ticket to the playoffs to a non-top-level opponent.