By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Barcelona beat a Langford-less Unics Kazan 70 – 62 at home and managed to preserve its few, albeit still existent, mathematical chances for making it to the EuroLeague playoffs.
Led by Stratos Perperoglou (13 points) and Victor Claver (12 points), the Blaugrana clinched their 10th victory in the regular season and can still hope with 5 games remaining.
Something that is not the case for Unics that is last with a 7 – 18. With Keith Langford, their go-to-guy and EuroLeague arch-scorer, the Russians failed reach sufficient production levels with only Pavel Antipov (12 points) and Quino Colom (10 points, 8 assists) making some offensive noise.
After closing halftime with a minor 36 – 34 lead, Barcelona found themselves trailing 38 – 41 in the beginning of the third quarter. Yet the response of Bartzokas’ players arrived with the powerful currency of a 17 – 3 partial score that helped them to a 55 – 44 advantage ahead of the fourth period.
With a 3-point bucket by Sasa Vezenkov (6 points) the hosts grabbed a 15-point margin to their favor, 63 – 48 with six minutes remaining. The only thing that Unics managed to do was simply cut its deficit to single-digit numbers.