Wins matter most for FIBA WASL-West Asia rebound king Arsalan Kazemi

TEHRAN (Iran) - Arsalan Kazemi achieved yet another personal milestone in Shahrdary Gorgan's streak-stretching win over Sagesse in the FIBA WASL-West Asia League on Thursday.

The star forward became the first player in the sub-zone league to breach 150 rebounds, doing so early in their eventual 81-68 victory that kept them unbeaten after four games.

He finished the game with 12 boards and now has 160 total, the most among non-foreign players in the pan-regional competition. Furthermore, he's two away from tying, three from surpassing the league-wide record being owned by Cady Lalanne of Kuwait Club over at the Gulf League.

Kazemi and Lalanne are two of only three players that have 100 rebounds to their name, the other one being Nick Minnerath of Shabab Al-Ahli Dubai also in the other sub-zone.

The 'Persian Prince' was quite astonished to have learned of that information, but iterated that he does not chase whatsoever any statistical record whenever he plays.

"Everybody knows me well. I never look for any specific stat. The most important thing for me is just to win a game," he said during the postgame presser at the Azadi Basketball Hall.

As he said, all that he's really concerned about is racking up Ws, and play the role which he best believes would help his team come out victorious when the final buzzer rings.

He's been playing quite a different part with Gorgan that's far from what he had assumed with ZobAhan Isfahan last season and the 33-year-old is totally satisfied with it.

From having to provide extra scoring to his old team, Kazemi is happily doing the other things on the court while allowing the rest of his team contribute however they could.

In fact, he only scored a point against Sagesse but had 2 assists and 2 steals. And it's not the first time that he's had a similar performance. He went scoreless in their win against Al Naft but chalked up 10 rebounds, 7 assists, and a pair of steals in 26 minutes for an efficiency of 29.

"If you watched my game last year with ZobAhan, I was scoring," said Kazemi, who averaged 12.9 points, 11.8 rebounds, and 3.8 assists for ZobAhan in the FIBA WASL inaugurals. "Because we hardly had really good players on the team and they needed me to score."

"But in this team, we have Navid [Rezaeifari] who can score 30 points any given night; Sina [Vahedi], same way; Will Cherry, the same way; and we have a lot of good bench players as well. So, this is just my game, I find a way to fill the weaknesses that my team has."

"I'm not saying that we have a weakness in rebounding, but I'm just trying to do the other things and let the other players be free and do what they want to do," he added.

Kazemi, who owns the FIBA WASL single-game record for most rebounds with 20 which he set last season, hopes that his mentality would be adopted by his teammates.

"I try my best to pass it on to my teammates as well, like, to just care about winning the game and the stats, they're not important," said the veteran internationalist, who's currently averaging 5.3 points, 13.5 rebounds, 4.5 assists, and 1.2 steals a night this Season 2.

"At the end of the day, maybe when I'm retired, it's gonna be awesome stats to leave along the way but I don't care, really, to be honest," he added, smiling.

FIBA