Marne-la-Vallée (France) (AFP)
Dijon qualified for its first basketball Leaders Cup final, thanks to its victory against Monaco 83 to 81 in the shock of the semi-finals between coleaders of the French Championship, Saturday evening in Marne-la-Vallée.
Sunday (5:00 p.m.) in the final, Dijon will challenge Villeurbanne, who crushed Boulogne-Levallois 88 to 59, a little earlier in the afternoon.
In an extremely intense match, the players of Laurent Legname ran after the score for more than twenty minutes, being up to 9 points behind (51-42, 22nd), but managed to reverse the trend to have two points 'advance before the last ten minutes (60-58).
The last quarter was that of Rasheed Sulaimon, author of 10 points in eight minutes, to finish the meeting best scorer (24 points).
The end of the very close match finally shifted to the Burgundy side on an alley-oop of anthology to the buzzer of Richard Solomon.
The JDA arrived at Disney with full confidence (12 consecutive successes in Elite and a place at the top of the ranking shared with Monaco), for this mid-season tournament with the eight best teams of the first phase of the French Championship.
They inflicted the first defeat in Monaco in four participations in the Leaders Cup, since the Roca Team had won the mid-season competition bringing together the first eight of the first phase of the Championship, in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and had not participated in the 2019 edition, sealed by a bad start to the 2018/19 financial year.
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