Rilski Sportist with an impressive home win

09-01-2009 19:56

Rilski Sportist Samokov not only avenged their 17-point defeat earlier this season to Euroins Cherno More, but managed to give the team from Varna a thrashing by a 30-point margin at home. The impressive 98-67 in favour of Rilski Sportist also meant the Samokov side has overhauled tonight's opponent in the Bulgarian National Basketball League regular season standings - both teams are now at 7-5, in 3rd and 4th place respectively, and the four way battle (with Levski and Spartak Pleven) for the slots from 2 to 5 is heating up.

The visitors from Varna had an early advantage, but it was destined to be the only time they would lead the scores in the game. Rilski Sportist started playing more agressively in defence and had a 9-0 run to lead 23-16. The first quarter ended at 25-19. Guard Ivan Lilov had a nice scoring spell for the hosts in the latter minutes of the first period and the opining of the second. But the man who was really "hitting the jackpot" with his shooting was young Serb Dragoslav Papic. The power forward netted 3 treys in consecutive possessions of his team, and the margin had soon burst open - a whopping 25 points (54-29 with two and a half minutes to go to the break). It was 23 at half-time - 54-31, with Papic already having notched up 16 points, Lilov 13 and Bogdan Boev and Travis Peterson - 10 and 9 respectively for the hosts. For the visitors swingman Simeon Tsenov was the only one in double digits at the time, and it was more due to his typical tenacious and gutsy play, rather than the team effort of Euroins Cherno More.

The second half was a struggle for the visitors, as they were desperate to put together a good run of scoring and defense, in order to attempt a come-back. It never materialized though, as Rilski Sportist center Travis Peterson was gathering momentum too and his team never let the opposing side cut the difference to less than 20 points. On the contrary - Rilski Sportist were having fun with their game in front their fans in Arena Samokov and things were looking worse and worse for Cherno More. Papic kept hitting the target from downtown and his 5th three-pointer made it 73-46 after 3 quarters of the game. Then his 6th boosted the margin to over 30 points for the first time tohight, with more than 7 minutes to go - 81-50. In those remaining minutes it was just a question of "how much" - that was for both Rilski Sportist as a team and their two leading scorers in the game, Papic and Peterson.

And the answer was - a 98-67 win for Rilski Sportist and 29 points seach for Papic and Peterson. The latter had 20 of those in the second half of the game, including 2 slam dunks in the 4th quarter, and also grabbed 10 rebounds for his double double. Papic was an amazing 6/9 from the arc and added 6 rebounds. Ivan Lilov and Bogdan Boev finished with 19 and 14 points respectively, while point guard Branko Mirkovic had 9 assists.

Simeon Tsenov was the top scorer for the visitors with 23 pts, Corey McIntosh had 15 and Brazilian center Atila Santos - 11 pts and 7 rbs.