Vladislav Emchenko: "The opponent caught the game"

Zenit guard Vladislav Emchenko shared his thoughts after the away victory over Saratov’s Avtodor (62:75) in the 19th round of the VTB United League regular season.

— We won, and a win is a win, no matter what. Of course, we had about a 30-point lead. In the fourth quarter, if I’m not mistaken, we scored only 5 points. We’ve had this problem this season: when we build a 20-30 point lead, for some reason we stop playing and relax. And today Avtodor — and basically this arena — capitalized on that: they went on a 12:0 run before the timeout. They caught the game and managed to slightly reduce the gap. It’s good that the difference before that was 30 points, not 15 or 20. Otherwise, there could have been some kind of tense ending.