CSKA — Astana, 02 May 2015

Our team left Astana some hopes for success in the first half only and ran away in the second half of the VTB League quarterfinal Game 1.

CSKA vs. Astana: 103-58 (+45)

CSKA: De Colo (17 + 4 as + 4 st), Teodosic (9 + 3 to), Jackson (3 + 4 rb + 7 as), Markoishvili (15), Korobkov (4), Weems (5 + 4 rb + 4 as), Zozulin (9), Strebkov (3), Vorontsevich (7 + 7 rb + 4 as), Kaun (14 + 6 rb), Khryapa (15 + 5 rb + 3 st), Hines (2)…

Astana: Johnson (17 + 5 rb + 7 as + 7 to), Mahalbasic (8 + 10 rb + 4 to), Ilin (7 + 3 rb + 4 to), Ponomarev (15 + 4 rb), Klimov (5), Marchuk (2), Kolesnikov (4 + 5 rb)…

Dimitris Itoudis, CSKA head coach:

Congratulations to my team. We are up 1-0. It was pretty obvious that we had two different pictures in the first and second half, above all, on defense. We played pretty well before halftime. Our opponent made some tough shots, but we talked during the halftime about how we needed to play better defense. In the end, we only gave up 16 points in the half. We should mention that Astana was playing without four key players, though we also were missing three important players – Fridzon, Kirilenko and Nichols. The team still played very serious.