Victory in Würzburg and that’s easily enough for a direct comparison. However, a eagerly awaited debut was postponed.
Pacome Dadiet’s debut in the Basketball Bundesliga had to be postponed again. The young Frenchman was the seventh foreigner in the guest performance of Ratiopharm Ulm in Wuerzburg not even to the squad. Which in retrospect was a shame. A few minutes of playing time would certainly have been lost for him in the 82:62 victory of his team, which easily secured the direct comparison.
That it was an issue at all, because Ulm somehow managed to lose to this Würzburg team in their own hall with a seven-point difference – that was difficult to understand when looking at the second leg, in which it looked like a class difference for more than three quarters. Only in the first quarter did coach Anton Gavel’s charges seem to be in some kind of holiday mode after the international break. Maybe they just had to get used to each other again after this time, in which the internationals Yago dos Santos, Bruno Caboclo, Juan Nunez, Karim Jallow and Fedor Zugic were only able to train sporadically with the team. After this first part of the game, Ulm was still 12:20 behind, but in the last minutes of the first half they pressed the accelerator and went into the long break with a 39:31 lead. If it had been over now, the lead would have been just enough for a direct comparison.
In the end it was anything but close. Ulm started the second quarter with a 13:0 run, for exactly five minutes and 19 seconds Würzburg didn’t score a single point, at 52:31 it was already crystal clear that they were enough for victory as well as for a direct comparison would. The tension was gone, the game remained entertaining at times. Like this Harlem Globetrotter-style alley-oop pass from Yago to Josh Hawley.
In the end, as so often, the question of the chicken and the egg arose and, as so often, it cannot really be answered. Has Würzburg perhaps played beyond its means so far and is actually not looking for anything close to the play-off ranks? Or were Ulm really that good on Friday evening? In any case, they did their job perfectly.
Ratiopharm Ulm: Caboclo (16 points), Yago (13), Paul (13), Hawley (12), Nunez (11), Jallow (6), Zugic (5), Christen (2), Klepeisz (2), Fuchs (2) . Langenfeld.
Best three-point shooters in Ulm: Paul (4/11), Yago (3/5).
Best Ulmer Rebounder: Núñez (6), Iago (6).
Ulm hit rate: 48 percent 28/58).
Ulm rate of three: 28 percent (9/32).
Ulm free throw rate: 77 percent (17/22).
Best Würzburg throwers: Whittaker (19 points), Hunt (13), Hoffmann (11).
