3x3 powerhouses get the job done on Day 1
The top three seeds (Ljubljana, Bucharest and Novi Sad) qualified for the FIBA 3x3 World Tour Prague Masters semi-finals on Saturday 24 August 2013. You may think the favourites had a clear path to the last four. They didn't. None of the four teams who made it to the second day (add Team Leningrad to the big three) are undefeated. Both Bucharest and ...
The top three seeds (Ljubljana, Bucharest and Novi Sad) qualified for the FIBA 3x3 World Tour Prague Masters semi-finals on Saturday 24 August 2013. You may think the favourites had a clear path to the last four. They didn't. None of the four teams who made it to the second day (add Team Leningrad to the big three) are undefeated. Both Bucharest and Novi Sad lost two of their three pool games!
The latter, which star three players who struck gold with Serbia at the 2012 FIBA 3x3 World Championships, lost one of these games in dramatic fashion on a desperate two-point attempt at the buzzer from Team Ostrava's Filip Zbránek that banked in.
The big crowd packed around the 3x3 court built on the iconic Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague got to their feet and reached a level of decibels only met later at the dunk contest final when Kristaps Dargais did his initial windmill throw-down and Lukas Biedny jumped over five men.
Day 1 provided many other highlights from Gašper Ovnik's no-look alley-oop pass to Simon Finzgar (Team Ljubljana) to the dance crew called Art Edition. Dusan Domovic Bulut gave a 1x1 lecture with fade-aways on one leg reminiscent of a certain Dirk Nowitzki. DJ Cut Dem showed quick hands, mixing and scratching like a man possessed on a day which saw nine hours of action. Because of weather conditions on Sunday, the dunk contest final and the quarter-finals were staged on Saturday evening already.
Team Leningrad, the second squad coming from St Petersburg which opted to play under the historic name of the city, absolutely silenced the crowd as they defeated the 'local' Ostrava team in the quarter-finals. Andrey Kanygin was clinical from behind the arc and the full-time surgeon Aleksandr 'Lis' Lisichkin showed good reliable hands in the paint. The same Lisichkin had sunk a cold-blooded free-throw in overtime to beat their upcoming semi-final opponent - Team Bucharest - in the pool stage.
Team Ljubljana, Bucharest and Novi Sad showed no mercy for the streaking teams, defeating in the quarter-finals the three teams which had remained undefeated in the pool phase (St Petersburg, Vilnius and Istanbul respectively). The Slovenian team featuring three players tied in first place of the 3x3 World Ranking are set for an amazing semi-final against the 2012 FIBA 3x3 World Champions.
The semi-finals:
Novi Sad - Ljubljana (09:00CET)
Bucharest - Leningrad (09:30CET)