Roman Knyazev: "I'm happy for the guys first and foremost"

Zenit U21 head coach Roman Knyazev shared his emotions with reporters after winning the 2025/26 VTB United Youth League. In the tournament final, the Blue-White-Sky Blues defeated MBA-MAI-Junior with a score of 80:71.

— Good work. I'm happy for the guys first and foremost. That's the main thing — this is their victory, their celebration. I'm grateful that we have such positive emotions today.

— From the very first minutes, the guys immediately started executing the game plan. There was a flurry of three-pointers, and they all landed. We knocked down our opponents right from the start.

— We planned to start exactly like that: to bring maximum aggression, push the pace as high as possible, and try to maintain it until the end of the game — not like against Loko, where we let up a little. And it really worked out; it played its part. We ran, we made our opponents tired, knowing that they had a limited rotation. We wanted to raise the intensity so they wouldn't feel comfortable.

In principle, we controlled the entire game. The fact that we scored so many is also great. But I can say this: it's confidence, it's hard work. Every situation that could be attributed to luck comes from work. Today we got rewarded for that. There was good energy in the locker room before the game. And all of that spilled out onto the court. The early knockout helped us maintain the lead throughout the whole game.

— Maybe the fans were surprised by such a performance — 35 points from Egor Evstafiev. But as a coach, you probably wouldn't have been surprised even by 50?

— I can say that our Egor is a smart guy. He made a colossal contribution to the game today. Bravo to him for that, for his resilience, for his calm approach to everything that happened. The whole team, despite the ejection and other ups and downs we faced during the game, reacted calmly. No one fell apart, no one gave up, no one started tearing their hair out — they just worked calmly. Egor truly played a fantastic game, a really smart guy. The whole team worked. It's wonderful that today this opportunity to help us fell to Yegor. We have many players who can score points and create chances. Today everything was working for Yegor, and we handed him the opportunity to take the game.