By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Unics Kazan suffered a heartbreaking loss at Barcelona a month ago. Now, they took some vengeance of historic significance at home.
It was the duo of Lorenzo Brown and John Brown III plus some stout second-half team defense that pushed Unics to a 70 – 64 victory over Barca, a first-ever win for the Russian side over the Blaugrana. Thanks to this result, Unics improved to 12-7 to remain within contention of the Top 4 in the EuroLeague standings.
Barca, that was minus leading scorer and rebounder Nikola Mirotic (COVID-19), saw star guard Nick Calathes after two months with a win and fell to 16-5.
Lorenzo Brown finished with team-highs 22 points plus eight assists while John Brown had 20 points and a career-high seven steals (also a season-best in EuroLeague overall). The former scored 10 of his points in the last six minutes and gave Unics the 66 – 56 lead with 3:04 to play in a crucial stretch in the match.
“Of course we wanted to win this game,” Brown said. “We owed those guys. It was a good atmosphere, our fans came out and showed up for us. It’s always beautiful to see them, they give us so much motivation in these types of games. [The most difficult part in the win was] just staying focused in the end: loose balls, turnovers in the end. That’s what we focused on.”
Barca cut that margin to five but was unable to approach any closer. Cory Higgins (17 points) and Brandon Davies (16 points scored in double figures for the visiting team that fell behind for good after suffering a 12-0 run in the third period.
With the score 35 – 41 early , Unics kept its opponent scoreless for seven minutes to go up by seven and led for the rest of the match.
“Offensively we were out of rhythm,” Barcelona coach Sarunas Jasikevicius said. “We are very happy that we have Calathes and Higgins back. We will suffer with them until they get back into the rhythm. They are extremely important players for us.
“Crazy”
That’s how Unics coach Velimir Perasovic described John Brown’s defensive impact, one of the major factors that led to his team’s triumph.
“We had excellent defense the whole game like John Brown, who had some crazy moments,” Perasovic said. “Lorenzo Brown had an excellent second half as well for us. Other guys helped a lot: rebounds for Mario [Hezonja], some important shots by Canaan, Vorontsevich. But today was a team victory and I congratulate my players for this victory.”
“Congratulations to my players,” Perasovic added. “They played really hard all game. Even in the difficult moments when Barcelona played better than us we kept our concentration and finally found a way to win. It was a defensive game because both teams had problems on offense. Today our offense was slow without the possibility of playing transition offense, to make some points in transition, which is always our goal. But today Barcelona stopped us. We needed to play a sometimes ugly, but very tough game.”