Before Devon Akun-Purcell I probably thought that in UNICS he will have more opportunities to show his best side, Kazan basketball club president Evgeny Bogachev told .
UNICS announced on Tuesday the signing of a contract with Akun-Purcell, 31, under the “1+1” program. The basketball player has been playing for Krasnodar since 2022 Lokomotiv-Kuban .
— We saw a lot of Devon during Lokomotiv matches, analyzed his game in depth and looked at how many matches he missed. Akun-Purcell played very useful for Loko, his success percentage was quite high. And the player is still old enough for basketball.
At different times, we have often hired former Lokomotiv players and coaches. And they also sometimes bring basketball players who played for us before. Because we all see each other clearly. We see that the basketball players played on good teams and were useful basketball players there. There is therefore less risk of calculation errors when signing a contract.
We saw Devon’s abilities first hand in the playoff semi-finals against our team. He’s a good player and everyone knows it.
— How did you manage to make this transfer successful?
— Maybe the player thought Kazan was a nicer city. Although Krasnodar is also beautiful. I don’t know, but even though we are not in the Euroleague currently, in recent years UNICS has had a lot of success in the United League and regularly wins awards. Perhaps he thought that here he would have more good opportunities to prove himself, to show his best side.
Although Lokomotiv is a very serious team. I would say it is our main enemy. They have a very experienced president. They had a good experience as they relied on good Russian players. And they had a successful season with them. I just don’t know why they gave up at the end of the season: they took several foreigners, but somehow pushed Russian basketball players to the side. It was somewhat surprising. In general, our seven-game series was a confrontation between two absolutely equal opponents. Maybe they made a mistake somewhere in their match tactics. We exhausted them, and they exhausted us. They could not cope with Zenit in the series for third place, and we and CSKA in the final. Seven games means injuries and everything else. In general, we are now refreshing the list and have acquired this player,” Bogachev told .
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Source : MatchTV
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