Drought in the attack and 38 penalties from the Poles: how the Russian team lost the key match at the KM basketball

In order to seriously engage in the fight for a place in the quarterfinals of the World Cup in basketball, the Russian team had to beat the Poles in the debut of the second group round. An unfortunate failure in a meeting with Argentina two days ago did not leave the squad of Sergey Bazarevich any other choice: only with the victory over Kadra, the fate of the domestic team remained entirely in its hands.

The next rival of Russians in the Middle Kingdom cannot be called an extra-class collective (the main star of the red-white is the American mentor Mike Taylor, who turned the team into a combat-ready combat unit), but the Poles have not lost at this championship of the planet yet. And they were not going to do it today. Indeed, the triumph in the reporting meeting almost 100% guaranteed them a ticket to the playoffs.

However, the Russian team spent the first half of the match almost perfectly - and before the big break, there was no question of any proximity to the historic Polish basketball. Bazarevich's team almost completely reduced the productivity of American naturalized by Poland AJ Sloter (faced with fierce resistance, he oiled 12 of 15 shots from the game and made just one assists), had a solid lead in the fight for a three-second zone and a couple of minutes before the end of the second a quarter achieved a tangible handicap of 11 points.

All took part in the creation of the reserve a bit. The coaching staff of the Russian team has traditionally conducted an active rotation of the squad (10 out of 12 basketball players announced for the meeting appeared on the court in the first quarter), and received much-needed mini-series of effective actions from Sergey Karasev, Vitaliy Fridzon, and Vladimir Ivlev .

But the main figure in the problem, and still working well until a certain point, attack of the national team was Mikhail Kulagin. The defender who failed the match with Argentina recorded 21 points in the asset following a meeting with the Poles. This indicator was the highest among all participants in the match, and Kulagin sent five three-point shots on target - one less than the full Poles for all 40 minutes of the match.

But after a long break, the Russians seemed to be replaced. Or rather, they returned to the state of general instability, which has become habitual in previous World Cup matches, which logically emerges from the huge personnel problems in the back line. Yes, the three-point “bomb” of the Zenit rookie Mateusz Ponitki with a siren about the end of the first half became the catalyst for the Polish comeback, but it was in the third quarter that the Russians for the first time had a long stretch without points. In his course, the Poles, of course, managed to play the rest of the double-digit gap in the long run and return to the game.

Domestic basketball players seemed to be doing everything right - they scattered the ball great along the entire front of the attack, regularly created open shots for partners from long range (the Poles simply did not have time to react to the crazy amount of passes in one possession), but things were going about with their implementation just disastrously bad.

The final 30% effectiveness of three-point attacks was formed thanks to crazy attempts by Kulagin Jr. and Evgeny Baburin in the end of the final quarter, when the opponent completely seized the initiative and forced the Russians to recoup. Before that, everything was even worse: before the Nizhny Novgorod defender hit, the Bazarevich squad did not score from the perimeter for more than nine minutes, for which she managed to earn only a modest ten points.

The Poles flew no better (they realized just 19 shots of any dignity from the game in 40 minutes - in the language of relative indicators, this is 36% of the attack efficiency in general and 26% from the perimeter), but Taylor had other weapons in store. His wards acted extremely aggressively at the final stage of the attacks, forcing the Russian team to face the problem of sorting out team comments already in the debut of each next quarter.

And thanks to this, the nominal outsider literally lived on the penalty line. A total of 38 attempts, 35 of which turned out to be accurate, and made a key contribution to the victory - in all other important statistical categories, with the exception of block shots, Poland lost.

Fate to the limit of a tense ending - three and a few minutes before the end of normal time, the score on the scoreboard was equal - predetermined the talent of Ponitka, who left behind several key episodes. In a seemingly hopeless situation, the forward, flying off the court, made a gorgeous discount on the perimeter for free Aaron Zell.

And after that, he played the representatives of the front line of the Polish national team twice in a row in the “paint”, from where the same Goal and Adam Hrytsanyuk did not miss. Russian basketball players did not find a symmetrical answer: out of nine shots from the game in the last 180 seconds, they missed seven, and Andrei Vorontsevich's foul hit happened too late to change anything.

Having lost 74:79, Bazarevich’s team has almost lost the chance of reaching the quarterfinals: if Argentina is stronger than Venezuela, Sunday's meeting with Venezuelans will officially become the last for domestic basketball players at the current World Cup.

But, in any case, Russia completed the minimum task of getting into the number of participants in the 2020 Olympics earlier, and counting on a real fight for medals without Alexei Shved, Dmitry Khvostov, Dmitry Kulagin, Timofey Mozgov, Joel Bolomboy and other performers, not getting to China would be too naive.