Home EuroLeague Playoff spot in hand, Loko dreams about Final Four

Playoff spot in hand, Loko dreams about Final Four

Photo: lokobasket.com

In a fashion perfectly matching its name, Lokomotiv Kuban has sped like a bullet train through the Euroleague season. In the fall, the “railwaymen” from the southern Russian city of Krasnodar raced to Top 16 after notching six wins in seven games, and eventually won their group with an 8-2 record ahead of Barcelona, Panathinaikos and Zalgiris, the three storied, tradition-rich teams with nine continental titles between them. On Thursday, they shifted into fifth gear and clinched their first-ever Euroleague playoff berth, with two games to play and a solid chance to lock up the second place that guarantees home-court advantage in the quarterfinal series.

What a difference nine months make! Last June, Lokomotiv’s Euroleague hopes seemed dashed – the team failed to secure a berth in Europe’s top club tournament after stumbling in the Eurocup quarters against another Russian outfit, UNICS Kazan, and then losing a United VTB League semifinal playoff series against Khimki. The club parted ways with head coach Sergei Bazarevich and was looking for a replacement. The Euroleague bid was saved, though, later that month when Lokomotiv received a wild card for the 2015/16 campaign. The good news kept coming and on July 5 the club announced the signing of Georgios Bartzokas as its new head coach. The Greek tactician had already weaved magic with Olympiacos, upstaging favorites CSKA and Real Madrid en route to the 2013 Euroleague title in London in his first season on the red-and-whites’ bench.

“Bartzokas is a top-class coach, and the season he spent not working is not a tragedy for him, but a positive,” Lokomotiv Kuban President Andrei Vedishchev told the club website last July when asked about Bartzokas’ one-year hiatus from coaching that preceded his move to Russia. “[The break] gives you an opportunity to recover, accumulate enthusiasm, get thirsty for work, we have signed a coach who’s not tired. During his sabbatical he analyzed many things, generated new ideas, gathered new strength. I’m curious already to see his coaching abilities at work.”

I bet he loves what he’s seen so far. Many basketball pundits agree that today Loko’s stifling, superquick, mobile defense ranks among Europe’s best: from the opening tipoff to the final buzzer the red-and-greens wear the opposition down through tenacity and focused effort which produce recovery and easy baskets in transition. On the other end of the floor, the Krasnodar team’s numerous sharpshooters provide plenty of offensive firepower from beyond the arc, often leaving opponents guessing who’s going to get hot next. Some nights it’s Delaney, some others it can be Draper or Broekhoff, Randolph, Singleton, Claver… Bartzokas’ deep squad offers multiple scoring options and the figures back this up: entering the season’s final third, Lokomotiv ranks second in three points made, trailing only CSKA Moscow.

In the milestone game Thursday (whichever team won would have clinched the Euroleague quarterfinals for the first time in its history), Lokomotiv rolled past a road-weary Crvena zvezda 86-62. The hosts won all four quarters and erased a 14-point deficit from Belgrade that also earned them advantage over the reigning Adriatic and Serbian league champs in a potential tiebreaker.

The game, though, didn’t live up to its billing as another memorable do-or-die clash of the two teams: the visitors apparently lacked freshness and an inspired effort by legitimate scoring threat Marko Guduric supported by another decent performance of backup center Vladimir Stimac was too little Zvezda could offer to counter Lokomotiv’s passionate surge toward its historic win. The Belgraders held their ground for a little over one quarter and then started falling apart as Loko’s defense forced numerous turnovers and lack of focus took its toll. Truth be told, Dejan Radonjic’s men did arrive in Krasnodar after covering 12,000 kilometers in a single week, on the heels of back-to-back trips to Malaga and Zagreb, followed by a flight to Moscow and a five-hour stopover in the Russian capital awaiting a plane to Krasnodar. However, it doesn’t take the tiniest bit of credit from the Russian team, which played one of its best Euroleague games since debuting in the 2013/14 season. After a hail of second-quarter threes ripped Zvezda’s defense, the only question that lingered was the size of the final margin. In front of sellout crowd that rocked the building, Loko kept its foot on the gas pedal and never looked back.

After the game, an exulted Vedishchev hoped that his team’s fairy tale was far from over.

“This is a big win for our club. We’re glad to be among Europe’s top eight teams. Our next target is to clinch the Final Four. It would be stupid to think about something else and be complacent with what we got. We’ll fight. Today, we focus all our thoughts on the two remaining Top 16 games, and then we’re going to get ready to play our next opponent whose name we don’t know yet. At any rate, the quarterfinal games will be very difficult,” Lokomotiv president told R-Sport news agency, adding that hardly anyone at the club had expected such huge success after returning to the Euroleague with a revamped roster and a new head coach.

“Of course, we dreamt about it, but we didn’t assume that everything would fall into place right away,” he said.

The way Delaney & Co. have been playing all season, that dream is now very much alive.

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