Strong starts sparked Ulm past Lietkabelis

ratiopharm Ulm avenged its 80-76 defeat in Round 2 in routing 7Bet-Lietkabelis Panevezys 78-69 at ratiopharm Arena on Wednesday night. The final single-digit advantage was not a synonym for a close game, though, as the home team enjoyed comfortable leads for most of the evening.
Key runs at the beginning of the first and the third periods were decisive for Ulm. It started the game strong by outscoring Lietkabelis 17-2 in the first 6 minutes and punished its opponent with a 13-2 score in the first 5 minutes right after the break. That proved enough to contain the visitors, who were as close as 40-38 late in the second quarter.
"We wanted to put an emphasis on how we started the game and the third quarter, to do it well, which in the last games we didn’t do," Ulm’s head coach Anton Gavel admitted in the press conference. "We wanted to show a different face than we showed in the last domestic games. It’s something that I think we did well tonight."