By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Sergey Karasev scored 26 points, Zenit St. Petersburg passed like a storm from Kazan against Unics taking a 109 – 84 victory that keeps it at the second place of the VTB League standings with a 16 – 3 record.
Despite playing without Janis Timma, Sergey Karasev’s players showed why they are one of the hottest offensive teams in Europe, producing the lot in the fourth quarter when they sealed their win thanks to a 15 – 30 partial score.
Unics Kazan managed to score a fair amount of points without top gun Keith Langford, but failed to defend against its opponents. Quino Colom paced his team with 25 points, 9 assists and 10 fouls won.
One dominant (15-30) third quarter was enough for CSKA Moscow against VEF Riga. Minus Nando De Colo, The defending champs faced some problems against the competitive Latvians in the first half but managed to win 83 – 99 and remain the standings leaders with a 18-2 record.
Cory Higgins (16 points, 5 assists, 4 rebounds), Kyle Hines (14 points, 6 rebounds) and Vitaly Fridzon (15 points) stood out for the winners while Armands Skele and Martins Mejers dropped 17 each for the hosts, the latter also adding 8 rebounds.
Finally, behind 13 points and 8 rebounds by Tony Taylor, Enisey beat Nizhny Novgorod 93 – 80 away from home and rose to the sixth spot in the standings. Coach Okulov’s team is now tied with Astana at 9-10 win/loss ratio.
Nizhny (Kenneth Boynton 26 points, 6 assists) is now ninth at 9-14 and sees its playoffs hopes getting diminished.