The Driving Seat and Its Burdens

This text was written for a video commentary, and this piece should have been published in video format. Following issues with the rendering, and the video not looking to be ready for publishing before the semi-finals, I scrapped the video format and chose to publish the text while adding a minority of the clips from the video. It was a back-up plan but also a last minute change and thus this text of the video commentary might lack the coherence of a written piece, as it is only the script text for a 20+ minute video commentary.

For the second season in a row, Barcelona finished the EuroLeague regular season as the 1st seed, matched up with the 8th seed in the quarter-finals and got unexpectedly pushed to the series deciding match at home court and prevailed in the elimination match to grab a Final Four spot. At mid-point of the regular season, I wrote that this Barcelona team was not all that similar to previous season’s Barça and unlike the previous season, they would have to be named as the clear title favourite by then the mid-point of the EuroLeague regular season. So if Barcelona solved their offensive issues from previous years in this season, why were they so pushed by an injury depleted Bayern in quarter-finals this time around?

The first leg in Barcelona actually showcased a typical matchup between these teams. Vladimir Lučić played his heart out on either side of the ball, but his brilliant performance was not enough to elevate his team over a great Barcelona side. Barcelona looked much more composed and played much more like champions in comparison to their troubles against Zenit St Petersburg in last year’s quarter-finals. Something in Bayern’s disposal was revealed however. Augustine Rubit is likely the most well-equipped EuroLeague power forward to defend Nikola Mirotić.

Unlike the Zenit series though, Mirotić has come out of this one looking considerably better. Which fits, despite the fact that Zenit did not have a one-on-one defender as well-suited to defend Mirotić as Augustine Rubit is, because Nikola Mirotić has had his most efficient, resilient and durable EuroLeague campaign at scoring the ball yet. Rubit’s defence on the Spanish international has had its effect though, lowering Mirotić’s scoring efficiency to levels around the previous two EuroLeague campaigns Mirotić had. That, of course, is a much better scenario compared to the regression Mirotić displayed in the Zenit series a year ago.

For Bayern, a negative result of this first match beyond just the loss itself, was the injury Darrun Hilliard experienced. Hilliard was sidelined for the remainder of the series which meant Bayern lost its most prolific wing attacker and keep in mind they were already deprived of point guard Corey Walden for the entire series. With Darrun Hilliard being the creative force behind so many of Bayern’s attacks in the first match, and with Barça seemingly imposing their collective superiority despite Bayern’s best efforts, Bayern’s road to Belgrade looked quite thin.

Hilliard’s injury allowed Jasikevičius to assign Calathes on Lučić because Abrines could defend a player like Nihad Đedović who is mostly uninvolved with the ball during Bayern’s attacks or even Nick Weiler-Babb who sometimes creates with the ball in his hands but not often.

Whereas with Hilliard playing, Abrines would have to either defend him or Lučić and in the first match Vladimir Lučić had taken complete advantage of Alex Abrines’s weak one-on-one defence. This worked to a degree, even though Lučić has a height advantage over Calathes, at least now he couldn’t attack a weak defender off the dribble.

So, with Hilliard unable to play and Lučić being neutralised offensively, how the hell Bayern managed to win in Palau Blaugrana 90 to 75 and earn home court advantage?

DeShaun Thomas is known for his scoring outbursts that happen every now and then, and when he’s in the zone, contests don’t really bother him. But beyond his epic shooting night, Andreas Obst and Ognjen Jaramaz stepping up in place of their injured teammates were enormous for Bayern’s scoring production.

Cory Higgins hasn’t appeared in EuroLeague since January but this was definitely the match his team felt his absence the most. Whenever Barcelona’s attacks got stuck, Cory Higgins has been the sole perimeter creator who could produce the required baskets for his team to stay in it. Although he is not a creator, Kyle Kuric’s outside shooting is another such instant scoring mechanism for Barcelona to lean on when their attacks get unproductive. In fact, in the aforementioned series against Zenit last year, that was often the scoring utility that they reverted to. One year later, Kyle Kuric had a horrible shooting performance in this entire series (3/20 3FG), including this second match (2/7 3FG, 2/8 FG). Therefore Barcelona was not only affected by the absence of their only reliable self-creating wing in Cory Higgins, but also the absence of Kyle Kuric’s instant scoring as a result of his inexplicable shooting contra Bayern. Of course Barcelona has a stacked squad, something Bayern doesn’t have and Bayern had their own absences in Walden and Hilliard, but neither of these facts change the realities of Barcelona’s vulnerabilities in certain areas, as stacked as their squad is.

One theme in this series was also underwhelming set direction by Šarūnas Jasikevičius, which really started to reveal itself with this match. In this loss in particular, the Lithuanian head coach opted to utilise Nikola Mirotić from post positions, interior isolations and as an inside out threat.

However, Barcelona is sneakily a team of questionable outside shooters, especially with Cory Higgins out and this ultra inefficient shooting performance by their most prolific outside shooter in Kyle Kuric. So this particular usage of Nikola Mirotić worked in the favour of Bayern’s defence. Barcelona could have garnered more dynamic attacking positions had Šaras used Mirotić as an outside threat instead, benefiting his gravity to create driving and cutting paths for his teammates and utilising Mirotić’s pick and pop prowess.

Bayern also was well-prepared with frequent double teams and their help and recover execution against Mirotić’s interior touches. Considering Nikola Mirotić is more of a straight scorer instead of an inside creator who equips the necessary court vision, passing execution or feel for the game to create against defences which double team him, Bayern’s defence benefited greatly from the way Jasikevičius used him in the 2nd match.

 

 

On the flip side, offensive rebounds and 2nd chance points drilled a hole in Barça’s defending. Augustine Rubit has magnet hands as an offensive rebounder, but the 5 offensive rebounds Nick Weiler-Babb sneaked in for, hurt Barcelona’s defensive integrity more than anything in their first loss in the series.

The biggest difference between the first two matches in Barcelona’s home court, was that in the first one Vladimir Lučić played dominant on both sides of the ball but that wasn’t enough for Bayern to prevail over this great Barcelona side. In the second match however, Lučić looked ordinary on offence with the aforementioned Barcelona defensive adjustment taking away a solid portion of his scoring. But much more importantly, Bayern was able to perform well as a team and managed to beat Barcelona as a team, with impressive collective performances. In that regard, the game discipline, motivation, preparation and continuity Andrea Trinchieri instills his team with is the most impressive.

Next week the series carries over to Audi Dome and some of Barcelona’s troubles repeat. Bayern continues to benefit greatly from offensive boards and 2nd chance points. Even increases its margin there. Kyle Kuric continues waste away possessions by missing open shots. And this time around Bayern even gets an enormous edge in the most efficient shot in the game, the free throws (Bayern shot 22/27 from the line to Barcelona’s 11/12).

But one crucial adjustment by Šaras allowed Barcelona to score 1.19 points per possession on 63 attacks they had, which means supreme scoring output at an incredibly low tempo game. Mirotić was utilised as an outside threat from the get go, off pick and pops, empty side plays, hand-off actions which immediately boosts Barcelona’s offence because they no longer so desperately yearn for a perimeter self-creator like Cory Higgins and their squad is much better suited to outside in attacking than inside out.

 

However it would be ignorant to say this offensive adjustment took Bayern defence out of its comfort zone because hardly anybody is as prepared as Andrea Trinchieri’s team. Augustine Rubit is not only tailor made to cover Nikola Mirotić one-on-one, but he also hedges and recovers brilliantly when defending Mirotić’s on-screens. And Bayern was using deter rotations when Laprovittola threatened the middle in different ways.

 

This is amazing preparation by Bayern’s coaching staff, because it would be a great tactical adjustment in the series, if Barcelona’s attack destroyed them in this 3rd match with their change in attacking strategy and Bayern defence came out with this defending in the fourth match. Although they lost the match, Barça didn’t destroy them thanks to how well-prepared they were for this sudden strategic shift in Barcelona’s attacking and Bayern’s loss here absolutely cannot be blamed on their defence. Which takes us to the other side of the ball where Bayern’s shooting performance returned back to normal so the sum of Barcelona’s very good attacking and very good defending in this match managed to overcome Bayern’s very good defence and insufficient offence.

The next match in Audi Dome strayed away from the general course of the series and offered more of a standalone defensive war. Bayern managed to carry the series to a decider in Palau Blaugrana by outdefending Barça in this defensive battle. If they beat Barça by outdefending them, the difference mostly stemmed from better discipline in the continuation of their defending, a more consistent attention to and execution of defensive rebounding, and not missing some great, open shots like Barcelona did.

However if there was one aspect that was relevant to the series at large, it was a continuation of aforementioned underwhelming set direction by Jasikevičius. Much like in Barcelona’s previous loss in the 2nd match, Šaras’s set direction left a bunch to be desired in this one.

Nicolás Laprovíttola has rejuvenated his career this season after a dry spell with Real Madrid and that has largely come as a result of his dynamic guard play and the off-ball actions that get him going next to Nick Calathes and Rokas Jokubaitis who assume the more point guard-like duties.

After Kyle Kuric, the Argentinian combo guard has been the player who was utilised by off-screens the most in Barcelona’s offence this season, but as Kuric was bricking the few open shots Barcelona created in this match, Jasikevičius hardly ever reverted to off-screen actions to get Laprovittola going instead. Laprovittola shot the ball terribly himself in this match, but that cannot be an excuse to the way he has been used within Barça’s attacks as much as it could be the explanation behind his shooting performance.

Dante Exum who has been up and down like a rollercoaster as an attacker, despite consistently being great as a defender from day one as a midseason addition, tried to attack Bayern’s defence as a perimeter threat and did horribly in this one with a bunch of turnovers at worst and unproductivity at best. Jasikevičius could have benefited from some attacking dynamism through his sets that got back Laprovittola on track this season but he didn’t. At least as equally detrimental was Jasikevičius not directing enough sets Nikola Mirotić’s way, who as a result, was not used like Barcelona’s ace scorer in this match, which he is.

Besides Šarūnas Jasikevičius leaving some meat on the bone as far as Barcelona’s attacks go, the sheer defensive battle of this match was something to watch. Barcelona displayed their hand, showcasing the strength and unity of their defence through brilliant collective positioning.

Bayern displayed their hand, showcasing brilliant help and recover execution and harmonious defensive movement.

Barcelona’s containment defence at its best is like a singular rock formed by the stifling positions their five defenders get on in unity. Bayern’s containment defence at its best is like separate stones being frenetically thrown at the opponent, embodied by perfectly timed help rotations taking away the good shots and recover rotations leaving the attacking side desperate taking one option away at a time.

Thus the series carries over back to Barcelona for a Final Four appearance decider in Palau Blaugrana. With another super efficient scoring output by Barcelona, at 1.23 points per possession on the 66 attacks they had, the Catalan side managed to carve out the win and move onto the Final Four for another chance at their third EuroLeague title, the last of which won 12 years ago. This time around not only Nikola Mirotić was utilised like the scoring ace he is for this team, Nico Laprovittola was unleashed through Šaras’s dynamic offensive actions that reinvigorated his form. Barcelona also did a much better job in securing rebounds this time around and even though Bayern still kept it competitive until the end, Othello Hunter’s clutch two-way play, Ognjen Jaramaz stepping up for the wounded Bayern attack once again, Nick Weiler-Babb assuming some of the creative responsibilities and doing well could not grant the German side their first ever Final Four appearance.

As for what’s ahead, the Final Four week to conclude the 21-22 EuroLeague season, Barça will have to defeat eternal rivals Real Madrid in the semi-final to face either Olympiacos or Efes in the championship match. One simple reason alone still makes me believe Barcelona is the ultimate championship favourite still, despite the fact that they were pushed to the edge by a wounded Bayern team which already has a clearly inferior squad AND despite the fact that this is so reminiscent of Barcelona’s pattern last season, when they escaped Zenit St Petersburg in five in a surprisingly competitive 1 to 8th seed quarter-finals, before barely overcoming Milano in the semi-final to then lose the championship match to Anadolu Efes. And this reasoning pertains to Barcelona’s attacking in these two seasons. What you might already infer from the analysis of the Bayern series is Barcelona’s attacking output against a menacing Bayern defence greatly varied based on how Šaras Jasikevičius

a) set up their larger attacking strategy

and b) directed Barça’s sets

Barcelona’s surplus attacking output in the 3rd and 5th matches in the Bayern series is indeed personally encouraging enough to have Barça as the ultimate favourite of the title still. I don’t believe this was an attacking potential or ceiling they had or could tap into in the previous season. Instead I think their attacking last season was way too Nick Calathesised so to speak, to have this higher ceiling, in spite of Cory Higgins being healthy then.

When push came to shove, with a spectacular Barcelona defence throwing the kitchen sink at the monstrous Efes attack, the Turkish powerhouse prevailed thanks to their attacking resiliency and durability which both pertain well to a high ceiling offence. This season Efes and Barcelona have pretty much the same scoring efficiency. So why not have Efes as the frontrunning title favourite again? Well, because even though, most of their attacking resiliency in the 2021 championship match were spearheaded by Vasilije Micić and Shane Larkin and those guys are once again coming to the season finale up to great form, a third dimension to Efes offence has always been significant. If Efes’s attacking monstrosity has taken a step back this season in comparison to their standards of previous seasons and it really has, this is largely due to this third dimension being absent from Efes’s offence this time around rather than any notable regression in the dual impact of Larkin and Micić. Kruno Simon being injured, if Efes is able to get an extra dimension of finishing at least, via either Adrien Moerman or Rodrigue Beaubois, or perhaps both of their Frenchmen, they could be the first team to win successive EuroLeagues in nearly a decade. I don’t think this scenario is unlikely but I also do not find it as dependable as the scenarios in which Barcelona or even Olympiacos achieve continental coronation. The depth and defensive excellence of Olympiacos could provide a tougher challenge to Barcelona in a potential final, than Efes’s potent attacking and clutch defence in play-offs.

With that said, this is a truly stacked Final Four in my estimation, and we could realistically see all four of the championship match combinations, which, is not something we can say for most of the Final Fours. Real Madrid might have been the most troubled team out of the four season finale participants, but they still have incredible defensive output, maximised by their dominating stunt rotations.

And the mental effect of a clásico in the semi-final, on the first day of the season finale, cannot be understated. Barcelona will go into the semi-final as the favourite so the pressure will be on them. Accumulated historical pressure, potentially, is also at play.

When we put on a previewing lens on the 2022 Final Four, the incessant race Real Madrid and Barcelona are in, to be the ultimate sporting giant of the world cannot be glossed over. After all, it is at the very least a partial cause of Barcelona’s increased spending in basketball since the summer of 2019. Current personnel of Barça was gathered as a result of the club’s will to win EuroLeague again first and foremost, and domestic competitions later. So they know it and it is inevitable at least some of them have that pressure to deal with. They ended a 7-year ACB league championship drought last season but since Barça last wore the continental coronation in 2010, Real Madrid added two other EuroLeague trophies to their cabinet and inarguably has been the superior club in the decade of 2010s. Not to mention, besides Real Madrid’s edge in league championships and Copa del Rey titles, they are the most decorated EuroLeague club with 10 championships. Barcelona lags behind with 2 EuroLeague championships and they kind of carry a history of having these very ambitious teams who end up getting bested in the championship matches, which is a historical baggage reflected onto this season’s Barcelona one way or the other. They were unable to snatch a EuroLeague trophy during their 1980s renaissance, losing the 1984 championship match to Virtus Roma. Following the Jugoplastika defeat in the 1990 final, they snatched away Boža Maljković from Jugoplastika but still ended up getting beaten by the Croatian powerhouse in the 1991 final despite the crucial departures of Dino Rađa and Duško Ivanović as well. The following year, their Catalan archrival Joventut Badalona came this close to winning a EuroLeague before Barça did, and two years after that Joventut actually took the trophy home before Barcelona ever did. The season after that, their Spanish archrival Real Madrid had won its 8th EuroLeague title when Barça still didn’t have one. The very next year Barcelona was back in the EuroLeague final, with another re-organisation and an ambitious group to finally bring the elusive trophy home, when this happened. No worries though, the historic split between the clubs and FIBA Europe was not to happen until a few years later, and Barcelona was back for their fifth EuroLeague Final appearance the next season. Which, resulted with another Greek club winning their first EuroLeague in their first final appearance.

It wasn’t until 6 years later with a complete re-organisation of EuroLeague this time around, not only a re-organisation in the club, and with a different group of ambitious and talented personnel, that Barça managed to win their elusive EuroLeague trophy; in Barcelona. 7 years after that they changed the meaning of Paris forever for the club. Fast forward to now, with a Real Madrid dominant 2010s behind us, Barcelona re-organised again, has spent tens of millions of euros to stack talent on their side and get back to EuroLeague championship contention. They are a better team than Real Madrid this season, but if they could not shake off this historical baggage and feel the pressure of the clásico they are taking the court early on sunday to play the most dreaded match in their careers. If not, Barça should overcome their historical rivals and await the more formidable challenge in either Olympiacos or Efes. But when it comes to championship prospects of all the Final Four participants via the lens of 21-22 EuroLeague basketball only, Barcelona is in the driving seat. Going back to my season overview at its mid-point, Barcelona is finally at the driving seat because Šaras Jasikevičius has managed to resolve their systemic attacking problems, which is why unlike before, based on his own coaching performance, Barcelona is able to display excellent attacking efficiency against the tense background and intense contents of play-offs. This is the insight their quarter-finals contra Bayern can give us, that the ball is on Šaras’s court, with regards to all four championship hopes in play, not only his own team’s. And if they are exceedingly well-prepared, if their attacking strategy is optimised and Šaras’s set direction is good enough, Barcelona’s output shall be enough to be crowned as champions, one way or the other. Because the means and utility of this team, unlike in Barcelona’s previous seasons including the cancelled one, are already in place, formed by the players and built by the coaching staff, to reach the productive resiliency and wide durability necessary, to actually go ahead and win the EuroLeague. Without it, you do not win EuroLeague, with a few exceptions here and there. Oftentimes we have multiple championship contenders who have that, just like we have this season, and in a lot of these cases, the best coaching performance ends up determining the champion out of them in the Final Four. The make-up of the Final Four, unlike the mano e mano coaching battles in play-off series, largely take away the match-up oriented tactical exchanges out of the play, and instead, demand coaching performances far more relevant to the true identity, scope, depth and level of the structure & the content the coaches have built and unleashed with their teams, all season long. That is why most frequent differentiator in EuroLeague Final Fours, is the intertwining coaching performances that week and for this one in Belgrade, the ball is on Šaras’s court. And there is no better lens to understand that apart from Barcelona’s quarter-finals against Bayern.

Peculiarity of Turkish Basketball Clubs In Light of Bursaspor’s Historic Day

Bursaspor has made a lot of headlines following their success in EuroCup knock-out round, taking out favourites one at a time, away from home, facing big crowds as the underdogs. They’ve unexpectedly made their way to the 2022 EuroCup Final, to face Virtus Bologna tonight, where once again the crocodiles will be the underdogs, facing a team which has been a EuroCup title contender from day one of this season, and once again they’ll face a passionate crowd, hungry for a EuroLeague berth after so many years.

It is astonishing that the only reason Bursaspor hasn’t already secured a EuroLeague spot for the next season, is the fact that AS Monaco made the EuroLeague play-offs this season. Since, as the 20-21 EuroCup champion, AS Monaco qualified to EuroLeague via EuroCup, only the 21-22 EuroCup champion will qualify to EuroLeague next season. If this wasn’t the case, like it wasn’t in the previous season, both EuroCup finalists would already have granted their EuroLeague participation.

A lot of commentary and analyses have been made on Bursaspor’s basketball in the knock-out stage. And I might hope onto that train myself, after the final, irrespective of the result. But this piece only aims to capture how Bursaspor’s success is more valuable for Turkish basketball than if most other Turkish clubs had achieved this, and inform about the make-up of Turkish basketball clubs to do so. Therefore, every Turkish basketball fan is already informed about everything that is in this piece, but I suspect none of it is exactly known to the basketball world out of Turkey and inside the sphere of basketball discourse of every language but Turkish.

Enter Müessese

Bursaspor’s basketball branch was only recently founded before the 14-15 season. Bursaspor though, is a multi-sport club whose foundation goes back to 1963, with the formation of the football club. Bursa is the fourth biggest city in Turkey by population, with 3.1 million people residing in the entire Bursa province. The reason behind most Turkish football clubs outside of the three biggest cities having the naming formula of “[city name] + spor”, is because these Anatolian football clubs were founded with multiple smaller football clubs in their cities merging together to create one big city club. It would be an astute observation on your part to make at this point, that Turkish basketball top flight only has two of these names amongst its 16 clubs. That number is 11 out of 20 for the football top flight. How come? That juxtaposition is, in a way, the subject of this piece and greatly relates to the state of Turkish basketball. Let’s delve into it.

The 16 current clubs in BSL, basketball’s top flight, present a spectrum of different club structures. Beşiktaş, Bursaspor, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray, Gaziantep, Karşıyaka and Yalovaspor are member-owned, multi-sport clubs. 5 of these 7 clubs made the play-offs this season. Yalovaspor has been relegated to second division. Two of the significant TBL clubs, from the second division, are also member-owned multi-sport clubs, Samsunspor and Konyaspor. Most of the TBL clubs though, are municipality clubs. That is, sports clubs that local municipalities directly own, fund and operate. BSL also has a few clubs of this sort, like the last placed & relegated Afyon Belediye and Merkezefendi Denizli Basket which closely managed to fend off relegation to TBL.

However, if we want to understand the make-up of Turkish basketball clubs and Turkish basketball history, we need to examine what we call the müessese clubs. The most successful Turkish club ever, Anadolu Efes, although in the purposes of this statement more fittingly Efes Pilsen, but also several other prominent clubs like Tofaş (which is also based in Bursa), Darüşşafaka, Türk Telekom, as well as the now-defunct but historically very successful clubs like Banvit, Ülkerspor and Eczacıbaşı are & were müessese clubs. They could be described as commercial basketball clubs, company clubs and so on. You see, Efes is a beer brand, probably better-known to have their sort of commercial identity than others who also have it, in basketball spheres outside of Turkey because of their history of European success. Tofaş is a Bursa-based automaker that manufactures Stellantis car brands for the Turkish market. Darüşşafaka is a private institution older than the Republic of Turkey itself, which famously provides orphan children with opportunities of education. Türk Telekom is, as you can tell from its name, is a largely state-owned telecommunications company, in the vein of Telekom Srbija and Deutsche Telekom. Banvit is a food company mostly known for feed manufacturing and producing broiler chickens. Ülker is a big chocolate, sweets and confectionery manufacturer. Eczacıbaşı is a large corporation that operates in several areas but most notably pharmaceuticals. How does all this even really matter though, what is such information exactly doing in a basketball blog? Well, perhaps the better question would be why and how such a wide portfolio of beer companies, car manufacturers, education institutes and broiler chicken producers were and are doing in basketball?

Before we proceed with the unusual existence of müessese clubs in Turkish basketball, we are better off searching for equivalents in other countries. Frankly there are absolutely no equivalents of müessese clubs, that I know of at least, in majority of significant basketball nations like Spain, Greece, Serbia, Lithuania, Italy, Slovenia, Montenegro, Israel, France. Besides the now-inoperative Croatian club Cedevita Zagreb (eerily similar to Ülkerspor: A club owned and founded by a food/beverage company, goes defunct after a short but successful lifetime by merging with a big community club, essentially just becomes a big-time sponsor for the community club, but still operates its youth academy for a few years after the merger) only some German clubs could paint even a semblance of equivalence. Most notable examples being Brose Bamberg and Alba Berlin. Bamberg is owned by Brose, an automaker. Berlin is owned by Alba, the recycling company. Alba Berlin especially, constitutes the best foreign example of a müessese club, since the club was essentially founded by the company, instead of being purchased by the company some years into its existence.

First of all, as we have turned to Germany in searching some equivalency, it is worth noting that neither the Turkish müessese clubs, nor all the company-owned German basketball clubs are similar to member-owned football clubs like Bayer Leverkusen (or Bayer Leverkusen’s basketball branch too for that matter), PSV Eindhoven, etc. These sorts of football clubs were founded by the workers of companies like Bayer and Philips, rather than being founded by the companies themselves.

Secondly, an important difference between Turkish müessese clubs and clubs like Brose Bamberg and Alba Berlin the way I see it, is that these sorts of German basketball clubs represent their cities in a way that müessese clubs have not chosen to do. Indeed, I am not talking about the amount of support these Turkish clubs get from their cities, that’s to come later, but the mere fact that Turkish müessese clubs have never really opted to brand and attach themselves to their cities the way sort-of-equivalent German clubs have done. As you can see, none of the müessese clubs ever beared the name of their cities the way equivalent German clubs do. Almost all of them had their clubs logos signifying their companies instead of any sort of reference to the cities. If I have to visualise Alba AG, the recycling company, shutting down their basketball investment like Benetton did in Treviso, I would also immediately visualise the club continuing on with an ownership re-organisation and probably changing their name to Berlin Albatrosse. When it comes to Turkish müessese clubs though, I can’t envision even such an effort for almost all of them. More on that later.

The Makings

In a way, the presence of müessese clubs could be explained with the absence of organic sports/basketball clubs. As established already, barely half of the top flight BSL clubs, if that, are “organic” clubs and only three or four at most, are as such out of the 16 second division teams of TBL. Istanbul’s famous, and infamous I suppose, big 3, have always been in basketball. Galatasaray founded its men’s basketball branch in 1911, only six years after the foundation of the football club. To my knowledge, it is the first basketball club to be formed in Turkey, at least amongst the active ones. Fenerbahçe’s basketball club was founded two years later in 1913, which again corresponds to the 6 years after the foundation of their football club. These two basketball clubs are therefore older than the Republic of Turkey itself. Beşiktaş’s basketball beginnings came 30 years later than the foundation of their multi-sport club, with Beşiktaş first forming a basketball team in 1933.

To be precise, the big 3 cannot be just deemed the big 3 of football, even though that’s where their domination is most pronounced. They are the big three in and because of excessive media coverage and public attention as well, both to my chagrin. They are also, most notably, the big three of the entirety of the sports scene in Turkey as well. Mind you, they cannot be hailed as the big three of any other particular sport but football, because even in sports where two of them are dominant, the third isn’t quite up there unlike in football. But taking a snapshot of the total sports scene would reveal this to be the overall picture.

Nevertheless, these three clubs have received and even continue to retroactively receive criticism for not properly investing in basketball. But they still were always there in the league, along with Karşıyaka from İzmir. Karşıyaka, crucially, is a de facto member of İzmir’s own big three of multi-sport clubs. İzmir is the third biggest city in the country, and it has its own big three of multi-sport clubs in Altay, Göztepe and Karşıyaka. The former two however, do not currently have basketball operations, unlike Karşıyaka and Istanbul’s big three. In fact, Altay used to be a multi-sport club but now solely operates in football. Perhaps now, you are starting the get a hold of this aforementioned absence of sports clubs in basketball to be filled up by müessese clubs. With that said, Karşıyaka’s significance to Turkish basketball cannot be overlooked. Not only they won a league title in 86-87, eliminating İTÜ, Efes and Galatasaray in the play-offs, which was four years before Fenerbahçe even won its first league championship; but Karşıyaka became Turkish champions once again in 14-15, eliminating Željko Obradović’s Fenerbahçe 1-3 in the semi-finals despite home court disadvantage, and then taking out Dušan Ivković’s Anadolu Efes 1-4 in the finals with home court disadvantage again. It is notable that Fener finished fourth in EuroLeague that season and Efes was eliminated by the eventual champs Real Madrid in a 3-1 series in the quarter-finals.

The Awakenings

I haven’t lived through those times and I’m not a basketball historian to talk of the historical developments in question here, but it seems like Paşabahçe was perhaps the first müessese club to be founded. Then there is İTÜ, which is different from all the others because it stands for Istanbul Technical University, which is a public university, thus there is not a commercial business behind or related to İTÜ that could be promoted. But arguably it wasn’t until Eczacıbaşı’s presence came about that müessese clubs started to be such a phenomenon in basketball. Anadolu Efes, or Efes Pilsen at the time, was founded in 1976 directly following Eczacıbaşı’s first top flight championship. Tofaş was founded two years before that. Both Tofaş and Efes undoubtedly made their marks in basketball.

3 April 1997 is widely known as “black thursday” in Turkish basketball. That same night, Tofaş was hosting Aris in Bursa in the final of Korac Cup and Efes was hosting ASVEL in the deciding leg of EuroLeague quarter-finals. Korac Cup had a home-and-away final format, looking at the total point difference to determine its champion. Indeed, Efes had won Korac Cup the previous year by beating Olimpia Milano this way, quite famously so in Turkey and becoming the first Turkish sport club to win any European competition. The following season Efes was competing in EuroLeague this time and had home court advantage over ASVEL. They won the first leg in Istanbul 87-71, losing 70-80 in France in the best-of-3 series format. Then they bottled the deciding leg in front of home crowd, 57-62, and missed their first ever EuroLeague Final Four ticket. Tofaş’s advantage was even bigger. They had somehow beaten Aris 66-77 in the first leg in Thessaloniki. All they had to do was to lose to Aris by less than 11 points or win the second leg in front of home crowd, to lift the trophy. They lost 70-88 to Aris in Bursa.

Recently, a while before EuroCup’s knock-out round kicked off, I had a conversation with a Bursaspor supporter. I had seen this person attending Bursaspor’s EuroCup regular season match vs Promitheas Patras, screaming his love of Bursa and passion for Bursaspor from the stands. Of course, he was a Bursaspor supporter in football as well. But, just to refresh your recollection, the club’s basketball branch was only founded in 2014 and they first promoted to BSL in 2019. Meaning, their first ever season in BSL was as recent as to be interrupted by the global pandemic. He told me he’s not that into basketball actually, because he had quit on basketball when Tofaş lost the Korac Cup in the final, in Bursa, 25 years ago, in that fashion. Then his wife played a role in the foundation of Bursaspor’s basketball branch and he got back into it. You see, he wasn’t into basketball particularly but he was attending that Korac Cup Final in 1997 like he was attending Bursaspor’s regular season affair vs Promitheas on some random tuesday evening in February. Of course, anyone who supports a club instantly knows what he’s talking about and is familiar with the strange and unique sorrowfulness of the few most memorable losses. We don’t incite or cause those, but we take part in them nevertheless. Those kinds of losses are the most powerful building blocks of a supporter’s relationship to their club and most impactful events in building their reaction to the wins. The relevant part to this piece though, is a reversal to the question I stated & implied earlier. Why Tofaş, the company, is in basketball and why they are the only prominent club in Bursa (at that time of course) basketball fans can go see and connect to? This question, and its various different forms from earlier, is admittedly sort of a red herring. The base level answers to that come fairly obvious once you have just a tiny ounce of context. The actual question should be what’s the impact müessese clubs have on Turkish basketball, coming to existence by filling up a certain void? Hopefully to be answered by the end of this piece, as a result of its entirety.

The Cornerstones

If Eczacıbaşı’s success kick-started this large impact of müessese clubs, Efes’s subsequent success turned it into an absolute phenomenon. Aydın Örs was promoted to the head coaching position of Efes’s senior team in 1992, previously coaching in Efes’s youth academy. Efes won the league title that season despite a rocky regular season which they finished a distant fourth, experiencing a mid-season coaching change which saw Örs assume the head coaching position. This ended the club’s eight year championship drought. They defended their league title the season after. During which, they were knocked out of EuroLeague qualifiers by the French champion Élan Béarnais Pau-Orthez and therefore began their European adventure in the 2nd tier European Cup. They made it to the final in Turin there, losing 48-50 to… Aris, in the final. At the time this was easily the biggest achievement in Turkish basketball history, and the events of this final is still subject to conversations in Turkey to this day. The season after, Efes three-peated in the Turkish League and lost to Barcelona in the deciding leg of EuroLeague quarter-finals after topping their group. So all this was even before the most famous and most impactful 95-96 Korac Cup championship, when Efes first took out Fortitudo Bologna in the semi-finals and then beat Olimpia Milano to win the first European trophy any Turkish sports club ever touched their hands on. Milano would have to beat Fortitudo in the finals to become Italian champions that season, in one of the strongest championships in European basketball at the time. If there is one müessese club which outgrown itself and become something else, it is Efes.

2016 – Aydın Örs (left) and Efes chairman Tuncay Özilhan (right) at the celebration of Efes honouring its legendary coach with his banner going to the rafters

 

You must see the appeal behind that. It wasn’t only that Efes marketed their beer brand by enlarging their trophy cabinet and featuring in high profile matches. Or it wasn’t only that they did all that while also benefiting to write off some expenses on the behalf of the company through their basketball investments. More importantly Efes was the first müessese club that managed to, just all of the sudden, even beyond their control, give a bunch of different reasons for masses to get behind their team. People at large, getting behind, emotionally investing in, supporting a team of a club owned and created by a beer brand for the beer brand. And then Ülkerspor, Banvit, Türk Telekom were all founded in 1990s. Efes had pulled off something so outrageous, even their closest competitor in the Turkish beer market, Tuborg, felt compelled to open a basketball club in 1993 following Efes’s showing in the European Cup and its impact in the Turkish sports scene.

Ülkerspor was Efes’s toughest competitor on the parquet floor. But Banvit was the only other example of having a widely organic supporter base. Banvit was based in Bandırma, a town in the city of Balıkesir. While Efes was defying Istanbul’s big three from their home turf, Banvit was doing the opposite. Banvit gathered the support of this town, as a result of focusing on this one small area. Not even Tofaş connected to the people of Bursa the way Banvit was connected to Bandırma, Bursa after all, is a major city. In 2017 Banvit, the company, was sold to a foreign ownership group, namely the Brazilian company BRF and Qatar Investment Authority. Two years later Banvit’s new foreign owners didn’t see any reason to spare millions for basketball anymore. The basketball people of the club were determined to continue with new branding. So with a new name sponsor and new branding, the club continued on as usual during the 19-20 season. It all lasted for that season only, the club was folded in 2020. There is some obvious bad timing in their case also. But it is remarkable that basketball had become integral to the town of Bandırma to a degree that they would try to succeed after Banvit, the company, pulled away. After all, that’s the difference of müessese clubs. They are companies, the basketball club is owned by the company and it is created for the company. So when the company erases the club out of existence, what is even there to succeed with? Müessese clubs differ from another basketball club which is owned by a company or the German clubs referenced in an attempt to find equivalences, in this way. Remarkably, Bandırma wanted to succeed Banvit even though the moment they withdrew from basketball, there wasn’t anything to succeed with.

Their efforts didn’t last beyond that one covid19-interrupted season, but four names who played for Bandırma in that season stand out: Alperen Şengün, Şehmus Hazer, Furkan Haltalı and Emir Kabaca. After their club was folded, all four players since then went onto play for Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe. They played for Bandırma because they were the product of Banvit’s renowned youth academy. Alperen Şengün was born and discovered by Banvit in Giresun, a northeastern Anatolian city on the coast of Black Sea. Şehmus Hazer was born in Batman (not pronounced like that, but might as well raise an eyebrow anyway) which is in southeastern Turkey. Furkan Haltalı, two seasons later still a teenager by the way, was born in Konya, a large central Anatolian city. And Emir Kabaca was born in İzmir. The significance of Banvit’s academy was not only their productivity or quality, but it was also they concentrated on finding kids who had talent in Anatolian cities, who might have gone unnoticed if not for Banvit’s youth scouting and never reach their potential and perhaps even never becoming professionals. Because, no matter how many müessese clubs are filling up the void left by a relative lack of communal basketball clubs or multi-sport clubs, most of them are based in Istanbul as their businesses require and even the ones that aren’t, are based in other major cities.

At this point, we are left with a picture. The picture of Beşiktaş, Bursaspor, Efes, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray, Gaziantep and Karşıyaka having their own supporter base as the clubs that are and will be in BSL the following season, Konyaspor or Samsunspor to join them in case they come out victorious from the upcoming TBL play-offs. Darüşşafaka deserves its own standing, their basketball branch was founded in 1951, which makes them the oldest müessese club that is still active, to my knowledge. Darüşşafaka also has its supporters. I personally know multiple Daçka fans, who travel to support the team in away matches. The only reason I exclude them is unfortunately their support base is not large enough in a way that allowed Efes to transcend the müessese identity. Or, more provokingly, their support base is not as large as it would be if they were instead a basketball club based on an identity of regional community. That, we can’t say about Efes’s support base. I hope it’s not an error of my basketball centric life that I think by this point in time, when the name Efes is invoked, basketball is the first recollected identity or image, preceding their beers. I can’t be sure of that considering my perceptional bias, but it’s certain Efes, the basketball club, transcended Efes, the beer company, in many ways. That isn’t to say the ongoing presence of the basketball club is no longer benefiting the company commercially.

Not counting İTÜ, since as a public university they didn’t have a commercial business to promote, the first BSL championship won by a müessese club was Eczacıbaşı’s 75-76 title. In the 16 top flight seasons between Eczacı’s first title and right before Aydın Örs era started for Efes, 11 titles were won by two müessese clubs based in Istanbul, Eczacıbaşı and Efes. 5 were won by three other clubs, Galatasaray, Karşıyaka and Fenerbahçe. In the 15 top flight seasons since Aydın Örs’s first league title in 91-92, up to 2006 when Ülkerspor went defunct in a merger with Fenerbahçe, all 15 championships were won by müessese clubs, with Efes winning nine of them, Ülker four of them and Tofaş two of them. This was an impact of Aydın Örs’s Efes on Turkish basketball, the influence of inadvertently making müessese clubs an absolute phenomenon for different businesses left and right. They all founded basketball clubs in 1990s, upon how beloved Efes came to be in the Örs era, none really succeeded in repeating that.

The Dichotomy

Harun Erdenay, who is nicknamed Pegasus after the mythical creature, as one of the best Turkish players of all time, played only one season in his entire career for any club that has an encompassing support base. He came to Fenerbahçe in 1993 and played the 93-94 season there. Ülkerspor was founded in 1993, following Efes’s European Cup showing that season, similarly how Efes was founded following Eczacıbaşı’s first BSL title in 1976. Thus the linkage of the three most prominent müessese clubs influencing one another. Ülkerspor was knocked out 1-3 by Efes in the 1994 BSL Finals, in their inaugural season at the top flight. That off-season they went ahead and bought Harun Erdenay away from Fenerbahçe and Pegasus would go on to play the next nine seasons of his career with Ülker, until he was 35 years old.

The first season with Erdenay playing for them, Ülker would interrupt Efes’s championship dominance and win their first ever league title. Örs’s Efes would win 5 league titles in 6 years, with only that 94-95 Ülker championship coming in-between. In the end, most of Erdenay’s prime is covered by his Ülker seasons, playing for a club that not only failed to be beloved like Efes, but also failed to capture a bit of the resonance Tofaş and Banvit managed, despite all of Ülkerspor’s achievements.

This sort of a trend is not to be observed only during the initial seasons of Ülkerspor, but relating to their last ever season also. Ömer Onan who was promoted to Efes’s senior squad after passing through their academy, was signed by Fenerbahçe in 2004. Onan was more of a defensive specialist for Efes, getting 404 minutes total in 26 BSL appearances for the club in his last season there. After moving to Fenerbahçe, he had 999 minutes under his belt in that 04-05 season, across 31 BSL appearances. He found a bigger role in the lesser squad of Fenerbahçe and his offensive game blossomed. And then after that one Fener season, Ülker signed him following his two-way display at Fener, and indeed Onan became an integral part of 05-06 Ülker which put a stop to Efes’s streak of championships, failing to win a 5th consecutive league title in 2006 play-offs. This was not only Ülker’s last league title, it was also their last season. They went defunct in a merger with Fenerbahçe in that off-season. Onan would go onto play for Fenerbahçe for 8 more seasons after the merger and get his number retired by the club. In light of that, there is some substance to the aforementioned criticism Istanbul’s big three received. They were there, having competitive seasons most of the time, but all this was a result of them not investing that much to basketball. That is not to say because they didn’t invest so much that müessese clubs came to existence. But because they didn’t, this outlined dominance of the müessese clubs throughout the 90s all the way to mid-noughties persisted.

On that note, a fitting banner by Fenerbahçe supporters, at the bottom:

The banner, one of its bottom corners not visible on the image, reads Bu Sene Efes-Ülker Finali Oynanmayacak which can be directly translated as “This year Efes-Ülker Finals won’t be played”, but I think more adequately captured in English as something like “[It] won’t be Efes-Ülker Finals this year”. Either way, you get it. This banner was revealed in a Efes – Fenerbahçe match during the regular season of 04-05. This is the away stand of Fenerbahçe in that Efes meeting, although both clubs used the same venue at the time, as both Sinan Erdem Dome and Ülker Arena were yet to exist. And context is important, right? After Tofaş’s 99-00 championship, league finals witnessed four straight Efes – Ülker series, with Ülker winning in 2001 and Efes winning the 2002, 2003 and 2004 series. Efes was looking to win their fourth straight championship and they topped the regular season with a dominant 24-2 record, Ülker following them behind with a 21-5 record. All 12 other clubs barely had a positive point differential, if that, with Beşiktaş coming in third with a 17-9 record and Fenerbahçe, Karşıyaka and Efes’s rival in the beer market but not so much on the parquet floor, Tuborg, following up with 16-10 records each. The regular season meeting when Fenerbahçe supporters unveiled that snarky banner? Efes thrashed Fener 94-62.

In an ironic way, the banner turned out to be prophetic. Beşiktaş eliminated Ülker 2-1 in the semi-finals, thanks in part to Khalid El-Amin’s memorable buzzer beating winner. Efes beat that Beşiktaş side 3-1 in the finals to win its fourth consecutive title. That said, the following season saw another Efes – Ülker finals series and overall six straight seasons of these clubs winning the league, a streak only halted by Ülker’s merger with Fenerbahçe.

On the one hand, there is still retroactive criticism, coming from all perspectives, of Istanbul’s big three not investing an awful lot to basketball, especially during that period of time. On the other, there were always rumours that Ülker would merge with and sponsor Fenerbahçe, Efes would merge with Beşiktaş and Türk Telekom would merge with and sponsor Galatasaray. There were also a number of people who wanted to see these kinds of mergers happen, because even to this day, a lot of people believe substantial basketball investment could only be done with immense financial backing of sponsors. It would be wrong to say this belief is restricted to Turkey. I’ve even seen Efes characterised as a club which has a main sponsor of a beer brand, by foreigners of course, not realising there is not a club to sponsor and the club is founded & owned by the beer company for the brand itself. This feeling also captures how a lot of people felt about the müessese clubs in general. Indeed, Fenerbahçe supporters were not the only ones to come up with a brazen way to deal with the sheer dominance of müessese clubs from early 90s to mid-00s. See the Galatasaray crowd performing a famous chant during 2013 Finals, at which Galatasaray ended a 23 year league championship drought, by beating Banvit, a müessese club in the finals series.

A good translation doesn’t even matter here, just know that Cimbombom is a nickname of sorts for Galatasaray and there it goes: “Let’s make history in basketball this year / Let’s not leave the trophies to the corporations / Neither Efes, nor Ülker, neither Telekom / Come on Cimbombom you’re the champion”. It’s an older chant than 2013 obviously, especially with Ülker revoked, but the 2013 league finals fit this old chant perfectly in more than one way. Although, the chant wasn’t out of use at the time regardless. My favourite recorded instance of that chant though, was when Galatasaray supporters used it in jest the first time Galatasaray hosted Fenerbahçe after the latter’s merger with Ülker, right before tip-off:

The Interregnum

With vast majority of müessese clubs naturally failing to achieve a stable support base behind them, and having presented the differing takes on their existence, this reading could take a fully pejorative turn towards these clubs now. Then it’s the perfect instant to remind a few things. First of all, if the basketball scene was filled up by organic clubs like in other countries, instead of a limited number of them as I’ve established again and again, these corporations could only sponsor the organic clubs at most and Turkish basketball lexicon would have no such term as a müessese club. Then, the investment of these clubs allow certain players to stay and play in the scope of European club basketball. If not for them, those players might have been playing in different continents altogether. Thus, these clubs contribute to wider club basketball environment that way. Forget about Efes-level investment, they are in a unique situation. Let’s take Bahçeşehir Koleji, founded in 2017, by the private schools of the same name. They might have won FIBA Europe Cup in front of solid attendance recently but they have no fanbase whatsoever. Still, they signed Langston Hall, from Crvena Zvezda after he didn’t have a good season there, they signed Tarik Black even though he was rumoured with multiple EuroLeague clubs, they kept Sam Dekker in BSL following his spell in Telekom and they signed Jamar Smith, one of the more prominent EuroCup players, right after his 20-21 showing that made him voted to be EuroCup season MVP, aiding UNICS Kazan with EuroLeague qualification. If they were to vanish, there isn’t a club to replace their level of investment, so all these players would likely be playing in Asia or Americas somewhere. This effect might be little with one club, but considering how prevalent müessese clubs are, it makes out to be quite the impact on the player market when you think about all of them.

And lastly, their youth academies. The older clubs especially, nurture and develop young players, whom we watch when they become pros. The more academies, the better it is for the production of players. Already touched on a bit about how Banvit differentiated itself in this area. But if we were to examine most notable Turkish players of all time, a good majority of them are & were products of müessese club academies. So I’d love to do a count and recall all the names, but there are just too many. It’d be easier to think of the most notable Turkish players ever and recall the names in the minority who were not developed by the academies of müessese clubs. In fact, there are even a few examples with foreign players. Most notably with Ülkerspor’s academy scouting Zaza Pachulia in Georgia and bringing him to their club at a young age.

My biggest, perhaps only, gripe with müessese clubs is how much their presence causes concentration on Istanbul. Right now 7 of the 16 top flight clubs are Istanbul clubs. Two seasons ago it was 8 of 16. So nearly or exactly half of the top flight clubs coming from one city, with only four of them able to boast a wide support base. This is a historical trend, if we go back to the first season upon the expansion to 16 teams, 8 of the 16 clubs were Istanbul clubs in the 05-06 season also. Turkish football might be in its most overtly political period for some time now, and this has increased the number of Istanbul clubs in football’s top flight, and yet 6 of 20 clubs there, are Istanbul clubs still. Most of the time it has been just three clubs from Istanbul though in the football top flight, for instance the 05-06 season had 3 Istanbul clubs out of 18 (16,7%) when basketball’s top flight still had that 8 of 16 ratio at 50%.

Football’s top flight has been almost always fully consisted of multi-sport or communal football clubs. There are two important results with the juxtaposition at hand here, which might be the essence of this piece. One, thus it is not just that Turkey happens to be one of these countries where basketball is second only to football in popularity but nevertheless still dominated by football’s sheer dominance in following, attention and popularity. It is also, because of the make-up of clubs in these two sports and the situation in their top divisions, football is way more widespread geographically. Whereas basketball is restricted to a few cities and overconcentrated on Istanbul. A lot of significant cities never get to witness quality basketball, bond with a club, and so forth, like they are able to do in football. Even in the capital, the only option to witness quality basketball is through Türk Telekom. And it is obscene to expect supporters of Ankara-based football clubs to get behind the basketball club of the state-owned telecommunications company, or non-affiliated basketball viewers in Ankara to bond with that club. Honestly Telekom has always gotten more support than I could imagine, even by some Ankaragücü ultras, but all that has to be an indication of how much potential is wasted in the capital. Even if there were to be an organic, basketball-only Ankara club, based on what Telekom has gotten, basketball in Ankara would be through the roof. Instead it is always severely hindered there because of this entire situation with the make-up of clubs. Then, even in İzmir, Karşıyaka covers their own territory but the majority of the city is similarly left open and thus its potential wasted and hindered basketball-wise. Because really, Karşıyaka covers the territory of 350k people, but if you’re from elsewhere in İzmir, you can’t support them. So we don’t quite have the third biggest city covered in basketball either. This brings us to the top, as mentioned there, Bursa is the fourth biggest city. Tofaş was its prominent club for 40 years uninterrupted, until Bursaspor burst onto the scene in 2014.

My previous piece on the blog had a very different subject but there was this quote towards the end:

However it is obvious this would utterly ruin all the other significant, historically important and communally relevant basketball clubs and therefore as a basketball fan it is not something I can ever support.

Mere months after Bursaspor was founded, this was their crowd in the third division of the Turkish basketball ladder:

With the causae per se and contributions of the müessese clubs established, it can be wholeheartedly said at this point; that would never happen with them. I don’t want to be dismissive of Tofaş’s support base, they gathered Bursa’s basketball following around them. To do so, they lost two finals series in 1978 and 1991, won the national cup in 1993, brought Rashard Griffith to Europe, made that infamous Korac Cup run in Griffith’s second season in Bursa, in the following off-season added Jure Zdovc and discovered Marc Jackson & kick-started his career as Griffith’s replacement when Maccabi Tel Aviv signed Griffith. Then, most notably, Tofaş made a back-to-back league and cup double in Turkey, with Griffith returning to Tofaş, adding Slaven Rimac from Cibona and kicking off his career outside of Croatia, signing David Rivers who was not even two years removed from being a wrecking ball in the 1997 EuroLeague Final Four and receiving the Final Four MVP badge, and even featuring talented domestic youth with Serkan Erdoğan and Mehmet Okur playing plenty for those 98-99 and 99-00 Tofaş teams that put a stop to Efes-Ülker duopoly and won all four league and cup titles in these two seasons. All Bursaspor had to do was start up the basketball club and compete in the third division.

I am aware, some people refer to this as “football fandom” and similar remarks. Couldn’t be more wrong. There are indeed a lot of people who are only interested in football and no other sport, or at least not basketball. Those people are so detached from basketball, they’ll never attend a basketball match. People who attend basketball matches, no matter the frequency, but like football better, are interested in football more and so forth, are not the football fandom. They are there for their clubs. You don’t see the actual football-only fandom of Bursaspor or any other club, in basketball halls. You are not a basketball fan only when it is your most favourite sport, and hopefully this statement has substance to it coming from my mout… well, my fingers.

Another, the very fact that basketball leaves a whole lot on the table outside of Istanbul, doesn’t only negatively affect the widespreadness of basketball in the country as the second most popular sport, but also holds back its sheer level of popularity too. Being widespread doesn’t necessarily have to affect the accumulated level of overall popularity. An entity might have the same amount of popularity overall in different situations, like being very widespread across regions or being concentrated in fewer areas. But in this sort of a dynamic, it does matter. And if Turkish basketball wasn’t so Istanbul-oriented, which it is, even relative to Turkish standards where a lot of things in life are already Istanbul-oriented; the general popularity of basketball would be higher too. That would cause ripple effects on the wider world of basketball, with the basketball consumer market in Turkey being even bigger and production of players & coaches from the country likely experiencing a qualitative leap as a result of a preceding leap in quantity. Of course, within less quantifiable effects, especially on a personal basis, even more dramatic effects would occur.

The issue of overconcentration on Istanbul is something the outgoing EuroLeague chairman Jordi Bertomeu had observed, as stated in an interview he gave before the 2017 Final Four. At the end of the interview, the interviewer talks about a recent basketball boom in Istanbul, quite praisingly: “Hopefully it’s a great Final Four. Istanbul… Really, basketball has exploded in the last few years. It’s obvious by the numbers. Tickets sold and the [TV] ratings are very good.”

And instead of following with the praise, hopefulness and glamour behind this perspective on basketball in Istanbul, Bertomeu chose to respond to it as a bit of a problematic situation:

But this is another point. So, one of the challenges is that, basketball is mostly in Istanbul. And one of the things that we need to also fix… to spread. Because you have four teams from Istanbul, from the market point of view, it’s difficult. So it would be good for basketball in Turkey to have a more spread [popularity/following].

Then they touched a bit on Karşıyaka’s 15-16 EuroLeague season, which had come as a result of their aforementioned 14-15 BSL championship.

Bursaspor’s EuroCup success exceedingly matters, outside of the context of their performance inside the four lines, in consideration of all this. Their basketball club is so new, they are even yet to play a full season in the top division without any crowd capacity restrictions along the way. They had a peculiar season, with a sharp turn since the new year, resulting in not hosting even one elimination round through their EuroCup journey. And yet, their supporters welcomed and greeted the team bus coming back to Bursa from Belgrade, celebrating their shocking victory coming in front of 19k Partizan supporters. And then they took out another favourite, this time in Ljubljana in front of 12500 Olimpija supporters. John Holland’s half-time interview from that quarter-final clearly resonated.

They finally got a comfortable win at Andorra. And thousands greeted the team bus returning to Bursa once again, confidently celebrating and awaiting another improbable away win in Bologna for the ultimate glory. Bursaspor’s European success and its impact in the city is for all to see. Its impact on basketball however, should materialise more gradually, but shouldn’t be glossed over. In 09-10, Bursaspor, in football, famously became only the second Anatolian club to win the Süper Lig. Only the fifth club overall, in Süper Lig’s 52 year history at the time. That was… quite improbable. However, from my perspective, a similarly improbable achievement isn’t this EuroCup run, even if possibly concludes in glory with another giant-killing improbable away win in Bologna. Bursaspor supporters are hyped, thinking of and searching pathways to EuroLeague next season, even if they lose the final. But not even that, I think in this case, considering the background and make-up of Turkish basketball clubs, the most seminally improbable achievement rather, would be the club taking its stable place along with Efes, Beşiktaş, Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Karşıyaka as another much needed Turkish basketball club with its own idea of where and how they want to be in basketball much like all these other clubs have their own differing perspectives, its own intrinsic connections to its support base, and its own performative identity formation. You only need to attend a match in the home arenas of these established clubs, to absorb all their randomly come about, but very different relations, self-orientation, identities and ambitions being repeated, internalised and practised. It is a beautiful thing, even if not all-appealing for everyone. As repeated ad nauseam in this piece, Turkish basketball clubs affected one another with groundbreaking impact, but mostly on the side of corporations diving into basketball investment. Hopefully, Bursaspor’s unique path will have a similar impact, just in a totally different direction.

 

Crossroads

With the conclusion of the 21-22 EuroLeague Regular Season, and more than half the teams already eliminated out of competition, reports have started to emerge regarding the payments EL clubs are about to receive. Mozzart Sport has come up with a list of how much all 18 clubs are bound to receive from the regular season, reported by Djordje Matic. That includes their revenues from EuroLeague’s market pool and competition bonuses both.

Euroleague Basketball, or ECA (Euroleague Commercial Assets), the governing body of EuroLeague and EuroCup, suspending Russian clubs this season as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, makes this current season’s financial distribution way more complicated than it usually is. In sporting terms, the controversial decision to remove all the played and to-be-played results involving Russian clubs is already finalised. However the financial consequences of this decision is apparently not yet certain. Per Mozzart Sport’s aforementioned reporting, whether and how to distribute the money involving the matches against the three Russian clubs is not yet determined and the total sum of money at play in this regard is 3.552.000 euros.

How Are EuroLeague Payments Back To Clubs Structured?

One of the biggest misconceptions regarding how and what type of money EuroLeague teams in any given season receive, is the myth that the champion only earns a million euros from the competition. This myth stems from the fact that EuroLeague’s championship bonus is actually a million euros, however the champion team already receives money before that. With the omission of the latter, it is often made seem like the competition rewards their champion team with just a million euros.

Before each EuroLeague season, based on a calculation of the various revenue sources the league has, considering the relevant contracts (media rights, sponsorships, etc.) in effect for that season, how much payout EuroLeague teams of that season are going to receive is determined. €35 million was the total purse to be paid out to the clubs for the 19-20 season until the season was first suspended in March 2020 and then cancelled, with the final six rounds in the regular season and the entire play-offs not being played at all. Which, as a result, left ECA in a situation to pay 14% of that money back to its commercial partners as rebate.

That was the precise reason that prompted me to come out with my own reading of EuroLeague’s gross financial mismanagement, through a lengthy but ultimately an insufficient Twitter thread in the grand scope of it.

Although I’ve written this Twitter thread on the day of the announcement that 19-20 EuroLeague season was cancelled; the news itself was not any surprising for me. You see, the act of poor management in that case already happened prior to the decision. The decision to cancel the season was already a natural course of the voting, following a scandalous negotiation by ECA management, which merely represents its shareholder EuroLeague clubs. The negotiations in question were with ELPA, the recently founded EuroLeague Players’ Association. Of course, EuroLeague changing its competition format from a cup to a league format also laid the ground for a players’ union to be finally formed. In all the previous EuroLeague formats, the competition was a cup and/or a tournament and the leagues EuroLeague players were playing in, were the domestic leagues their respective clubs were competing in. 16-17 season truly marks EuroLeague actually becoming a basketball league and indirectly gets rid of the fragmentation of the leagues which makes a players’ union to be far more effective in practice. Presumably nobody would object to players unionising, who make up the majority of the labour force, if and when you see EuroLeague or club basketball at large as a business, which it absolutely is, even if it is also much more than that. And ECA was not only quick to recognise players’ union but also quick to involve ELPA in all kinds of matters that directly concern EuroLeague players. The decision on whether to continue the 19-20 EuroLeague season could only therefore be taken following an agreement between ECA representing the clubs and ELPA representing the players. Because no party was going to, or even could force the players to finish the remainder of the season in the situation the world was in the Spring of 2020. Ultimately the season was cancelled because the players didn’t want to play.

So, then, what exactly scandalous negotiations by the body representing the clubs mean in that case? Well, if the clubs wanted to resume the season, and of course they did, because they literally do not have one reason not to, ranging from financial to contractual and all other kinds of reasons; the body representing them should have come up with a proposal appealing to players. What ELPA got out of these negotiations was that the players would be paid 80% of their wages if the rest of the EuroLeague season was not to be played. But if the season was to re-start in some form, more of their wages would be paid by the clubs. And of course that makes perfect sense, after all, that 14% rebate ECA had to pay in the following season was a result of the broadcasters not receiving some of the product they paid for, ditto for sponsors and such. So if the season was to re-start in some form, at least some of that revenue would go to the clubs and then they could pay their players for performing in these matches that added further revenue. The scandalous part is that if the EuroLeague season was to start, the players would be paid 85% of their wages.

A good amount of the players had returned home following the suspension of the season. And here goes the management body of the clubs offering them a 5% increase in wages if they returned, gathered back with their teams, prepared for the remainder of the season following an untimely interruption and played basketball matches in empty halls when most of the world was in lockdown. Naturally, they chose to not complete the 19-20 season. Except, if you were playing in Spanish, German or Israeli Leagues. Because unlike EuroLeague; Liga ACB, Basketball Bundesliga and Israeli Basketball Premier League successfully re-started and completed their 19-20 seasons.

What happened with the 19-20 EuroLeague season is important to understand the structure of 21-22 EuroLeague payouts. There might have been a rebate of 14%, but EuroLeague revenue took a 30% hit as a result of 19-20 season’s cancellation. Quite honestly, I had expected the rebate figure to be higher but I wasn’t surprised by the 30% revenue hit EuroLeague took as a result of the cancellation. And, it’d be all fine and dandy had management come up with an appealing offer on behalf of the clubs, for their players to resume playing that season and if the players still refused to. No, EuroLeague took a 30% revenue hit because its management negotiated a 5% increase in players’ wages as to incentivise them to return, train and play.

How EuroLeague splits its payouts is similar to how UEFA does it for their own club competitions in football, at least in terms of its broad structure. This could also apply to other pan-European club competitions like CEV Champions League and EHF Champions League, but since their financial information are not as easily accessible as UEFA’s, I’ll stick to UEFA. The broad structure consists of payments coming from the market pool and the prize money. For the 19-20 EuroLeague season, the €35 million purse which was going to be paid to the clubs, had a 54% to 46% split. 54% coming from the market pool means that whichever country the EuroLeague club is from, and however much commercial revenue is coming from that country in the form of EuroLeague’s media rights sales and (regional) sponsorships from there, it is paid back to the club. Of course, if there are multiple clubs from that country, then they share their cut of the market pool. However EuroLeague did not just gave away their revenues back to the clubs this way, as 46% of such revenues were used for prize money. UEFA’s broad payout structure is the same, except UEFA famously leans a lot heavier on prize money than the market pool as a percentage of their total purse. UCL clubs are not getting about 2.7 million euros for a group stage win whenas EuroLeague champion gets a bonus of a million euros for the title solely because UCL is that much more popular and that much richer. But it’s also because UEFA takes the lucrative media rights sales from France, Germany, Italy, England, Spain and hand out vast majority of it through prize money rather than the market pool.

Cancellation of the 19-20 EuroLeague season and the subsequent 30% revenue loss changed this structure even more in favour of the market pool. For the 20-21 EuroLeague season, clubs agreed to change the total purse payout to be 79% from the market pool and 21% from prize money. The logic was that, if the season was interrupted again and/or some matches couldn’t have been played, the clubs would still receive some of their money because obviously the prize money payouts depend on the matches being played. This 79% to 21% split seems to have continued for this 21-22 EuroLeague season too, and it remains to be seen if and when the 54% – 46% split will come back.

21-22 EuroLeague Regular Season Payouts

Market Pool Payments in €

Maccabi Tel Aviv: 3,145,881

Olympiacos and Panathinaikos: 2,681,625

Real Madrid and Barcelona: 2,319,424

Anadolu Efes, Olimpia Milano and Fenerbahçe: 1,275,000:

Baskonia: 1,140,768

Bayern München: 943,500

ASVEL and Žalgiris: 688,500

AS Monaco, Zenit, CSKA Moscow, UNICS Kazan, Crvena Zvezda and Alba Berlin: 200,000

The clubs who receive €200k from the market pool do so because they are not shareholders of ECA unlike the other clubs. CSKA is the only exception and there is an asterisk next their name on Mozzart Sport’s list. It is not clear for me whether CSKA is actually going to receive a downgraded €200k from the market pool, or not at all, and if so how is that all going to work out considering they own nearly 6% of ECA like the other 12 EuroLeague clubs which are going to retain their shares at least until after the 25-26 season.

The reason Maccabi Tel Aviv has the highest market pool payment is not because Israel is the most lucrative market, but because they don’t share their market pool income with another Israeli club. For instance, Panathinaikos and Olympiacos share the market pool cut of Greek TV rights which is at €10.5 million for the 21-22 season and the ACB clubs share the €15 million DAZN pays to broadcast EuroLeague in Spain. Israel’s broadcasting contract which started back in 16-17 with the format change ends after this season, and is at €5.3 million a season. Despite EuroLeague’s lower broadcasting income from Israel in comparison, Maccabi Tel Aviv doesn’t have to share their market pool income with another club, so they get to top the list. This is a payout phenomenon that is common to observe in UEFA’s club competitions as well.

Prize money earnings are applied on top of these market pool income and with the current state of reduced prize money share, that means clubs are given €37k per each regular season win and €70k per each quarter-final match win. And then Final Four bonuses are paid, where the 4th placed team receives a bonus of €150k, third placed team receives a bonus of €300k, runner ups receive a bonus of €500k and champion team receives a title bonus of one million euros.

However a careful look at these numbers clearly reveal that total purse to be given to the clubs is a lesser figure than even just the sums of broadcasting rights fees EuroLeague receives from the countries that have EuroLeague clubs in that season. Never mind other sources of EuroLeague revenue like sponsorships, some Final Four related revenue and so forth. In fact, I could say the total payout given back to the clubs is only slightly higher than half of EuroLeague’s revenue. However EuroLeague itself does not disclose the revenue percentage amount they are giving as payouts to the clubs.

There are probably a couple reasons for that, but it’s open to speculation. There is the IMG element in this equation. IMG’s joint venture with EuroLeague dictates, over the 10 year span of their joint venture, revenues above €630 million, thus on average €63 million per season, are going to be split between the two entities, with IMG taking 46% of the surplus revenue and ECA taking 54% of the surplus revenue. However, the specific revenue targets in each season is not known, and according to the revenue target they have, ECA might be bound to share some revenue with IMG. And by that I do not mean their surplus revenue agreement.

There is also the element of EuroCup. Whilst it is under the roof of ECA also, EuroCup’s revenue streams have been separated from EuroLeague’s a few years ago. However EuroCup is not profitable on its own. Well, not because sporting competitions are run for profit, but Mundo Deportivo reported EuroCup’s operational costs reach €7 million when its revenue is below even €3 million. Therefore that gap is covered with EuroLeague’s revenues. And since majority of ECA shareholders are EuroLeague clubs, especially after the pandemic struck their revenues harshly, a lot of them, if not all of them, do not want to subsidise EuroCup anymore. That seems to be the reason behind EuroCup cutting down to 20 teams from 24 and moving to its brand new competition format with the 21-22 season. And during the saga of clubs meeting to discuss ousting Jordi Bertomeu, it was initially reported Bertomeu conceded their financing of EuroCup in exchange to keep his position. Of course, even if that were to be valid reporting, it still did not prevent Bertomeu from being ousted with a 11-0 unanimous vote.

So, What Now?

Based on the rumoured successors of Jordi Bertomeu, I cannot personally think EuroLeague’s off-the-court mismanagement should come to an immediate stop. It’s not about the names per se, as much as what they are implying. Because that implication suggests there is not somebody who has the necessary vision and the unrelenting will to achieve adequate monetisation following decades of severe undermonetisation. Of course, it depends on what kind of management structure will follow, not just the names. If a basketball executive replaces Jordi Bertomeu, but the entire commercial operation is entrusted with ECA’s business development team (i.e. the executives who deal with the sponsorship side of things), then that’s a new management style that might yield more productive results to adequate monetisation of the product. This, I say, because sponsorships has been the only business operation of ECA that has been adequately monetised relative to the popularity of the product. And that is not by luck, it is rather the result of effective strategies taken such as widening the sponsorship portfolio with the stark split of central and regional EuroLeague sponsors, as well as non-monetary partnerships to boost exposure in secondary markets.

However reaching adequate monetisation is not only about who is in the management. And as gross of a financial regression ECA management has overseen in their long tenures, they are not solely responsible for European club basketball’s overall revenues being so awfully underwhelming.

Why and How European Club Basketball Economy Underwhelms

Since 2015, European club basketball faces two forces who each strangle its economy in very different ways. Before 2015, it used to be just the one. It’s not only because of underwhelming financial management by the executives of the competitions, but also because of this prolonging pressure on its neck applied by one of these forces, the other force was able to strangle its neck too.

These two stranglers are also ironically European club basketball’s closest comparisons in the world of professional sports. One of them is European football, the old strangler. The other is the NBA, the newer strangler. The crux of it all is that the new strangler is able to impose itself partially due to the old strangler’s pressure on European basketball’s neck. In fact, I’m confident the new strangler wouldn’t become one, if the old strangler wasn’t one. If this reads like an analogy that refers to football’s sheer dominance of sports consumption across Europe, I’d advise you to expect just a little better of this article. Because, no, of course I’m not going to make an argument saying if football wasn’t so dominant then basketball would be more popular across Europe which would have resulted in higher revenues and then not being so vulnerable against the NBA in their mutual battle over the supply of labour. No, this analogy refers to the market mechanics of audiovisual rights in Europe and the United States.

Before delving into how exactly European football undermines European basketball’s economy and how and why NBA benefits from it though, I think it’s worth mentioning why that even matters. Indeed, why should how much European basketball is able to monetise its products matter for us? Who cares? If we enjoy consuming a sports entity, we just enjoy it. Why is it worth even thinking about, never mind writing about it this much? Well, I cannot argue it should matter for anyone other than myself. I could only explain why it matters according to my view in all this.

As mentioned earlier, European club basketball’s identity is closest to European football and the NBA in the world of pro sports. The latter is obvious, as different as the FIBA and NBA rulesets are, as different as the refereeing often is and most importantly as different as the competition structures are which play profound roles in organically differentiating gameplay; it is still the same sport. And not only that but the personnel exchange between the NBA and European basketball is some sort of a busy labour channel that impacts both brands of basketball. However, because of all these stark differences between these two, European basketball is more similar to European football than the NBA in many areas too. Frankly, this is the case for how European team sports are structured in general, but I am specifically mentioning football because both more people are familiar with it and also because a higher number of European basketball clubs are under the same roof of the same sports club with their football counterparts, than with volleyball, handball, rugby or water polo.

Thus from a simpler perspective, European basketball stands somewhere in between, or at least standing from a similar distance to the two stranglers of its economy. This already implies that it has its own idiosyncratic product and gameplay. I’ve always enjoyed that brand of basketball, but it wasn’t until a decade into my own consumption of it that I noticed its existence is actually quite fragile. This ascription of fragility depends on a few things. Firstly, this idiosyncratic product of basketball is really only applicable to high level European basketball, not all of it. And this isn’t even taking into consideration European basketball leagues from regions where basketball is unpopular. Simply leaving such leagues out of the equation, and only considering the regions where basketball has some popularity, where competitive basketball clubs in continental competitions exist, this unique identity of basketball is still reserved for the minority of the teams. Therefore EuroLeague teams are most of these teams who play within the framework of this unique brand of high level FIBA basketball, even though it is not a brand of basketball only the EuroLeague teams possess or execute. This unfortunate limit on quantity of a certain type of quality is what makes European basketball’s position fragile.

In my estimation, what makes the product appealing to people is the brand of the game high level FIBA basketball offers. At the very least it breaks the first barrier to engagement. We may move onto consume, say, mid-level European basketball from that point onwards, however that engagement would largely vanish without the presence of high-level club basketball that is always out there somewhere, even when you’re not watching.

NBA is a strangler of club basketball at this juncture because it is a natural and a direct competitor on the supply of the labour force. I don’t agree that NBA is a competitor on demand/attention, there is at least a give and take relation in that regard. But they are European club basketball’s only worthwhile competitor on the supply of the labour force. A more radical take though, could be saying that actually until 2015 it was no such strangler. With the new national broadcasting contracts they agreed upon in 2015, and the subsequent massive increase in NBA franchises’ wage bills, things have changed. The financial gap has reached a degree then that not just players who get offered lucrative NBA contracts made the move, but players who wanted to just stop by for a season or two, collect the check and experience what that kind of basketball environment is like, abruptly made the NBA move too. It reached a degree that players who were yet to even prove themselves as high level EuroLeague players were getting offered better NBA wages left and right. However, because of the limited room for labour force in sport, and NBA’s very different league structure that leans more on development and less on the immediacy of competition, high level European basketball has not seen its unique product crumble just yet, with its own labour force in tact. In fact, I believe the product is as uniquely great as it has ever been.

The problem then, is not an ongoing crisis of a basketball crumbling, but the inevitably of that crisis coming if European club basketball economy continues to lag. After all, if NBA started to take absolute and sole control on the supply of the labour force in 2015, that had as much to do, if not more, with complete stagnation of club basketball economy over the 21st century.

Naturally, if this dynamic of growth and non-growth of the two basketball economies continue to be the case over the long run, at some point the limited room for labour force in sport is not going to stop the NBA from completely destroying high level club basketball in Europe. This isn’t to exaggerate, that brand of basketball in club competitions is literally going to vanish if NBA’s economy reaches a point where they are comfortable to subsidise a feeder/international competition with serious money.

In person, I have received counter-arguments on this so called battle over the supply of the labour force. That argument is that it doesn’t matter how much NBA dominates the supply of the labour force, there will always be players available and European clubs will always get to complete their squads. That doesn’t sound too exciting, but the argument follows that the sporting culture and basketball consumption are so deeply and structurally apart in the US and Europe that European basketball will continue to sustain their audience even in such a scenario. Indeed, the basis of that counter-argument is completely valid. On the one hand you have a basketball league where the central league identity is its structural pillar, and on the other hand you have a basketball environment wherein the identities and independent power of individual clubs are its structural pillars. The latter situation at least, is not specific to the sport of basketball either, and is the case for all European team sports. Leaning more on the consumption side of the difference then, you have one basketball product wherein the most impactful single driver of success is your best player and you have another basketball product wherein the most impactful single driver of success is your head coach.

However I have two objections to the view that club basketball wouldn’t quite be affected by wide exodus of its high level players. It would likely mean the low to mid-level brand of club basketball becomes the new on-court product. I am skeptical that audience is going to be retained in this scenario. Well, it is going to be retained to some degree but I imagine to be heavy losses. Basically the audience retained could only be limited to club support, with next to zero general basketball fandom remaining. Second, I do not ever wish to witness that brand, style, tradition, identity of high level collective basketball vanish. And so, even if the audience is going to be retained, it does not really matter, for me personally.

Moving on from the Transatlantic effect on club basketball economy, how does European football allow that Transatlantic effect to occur in the first place?

In the entire sports economy, the primary revenue source that makes an entire league or another long-lasting competition financially powerful on the whole, is their media rights revenue. Club basketball’s direct competitor over the supply of labour, enjoys the benefits of being in a television market where more than half of the households in its domestic market pay for television. This is not even close to be the case in any of the television markets in relevant countries to European club basketball. NBA enjoys another benefit. It too, is dominated by another sport in mass consumption, American football. However American football is largely broadcasted on free TV, so most of its media rights revenue indirectly comes from commercials rather than premium TV subscriptions. That leaves NBA, and some other popular sports entities in the US which are all dominated by American football in mass consumption, to enjoy being overpaid relative to their viewership. Because the excess money gathered from premium TV subscriptions is used to buy these secondarily popular sports rights.

In the broadcast markets of European basketball, that level of household penetration of premium TV subscription does not exist. And, if that makes you think of free TV broadcasting, free TV broadcasting is good for exposure to the product, but is always a considerable (immediate) financial setback to what premium media channels offer. But even a bigger problem is that, European basketball does not get to enjoy the absence of the sport it is dominated by in terms of mass consumption, like NBA does. Because European football is behind broadcast subscription paywalls as well.

In Italy, through research conducted by Ipsos and StageUp, who have conducted these surveys since 2001, it was revealed that Lega Basket Serie A fans in Italy have reached 6.044.000 people during the 20-21 season, up 7,6% from the 18-19 season. Serie A Calcio in contrast had 24.602.000 fans during the 20-21 season, down 2,6% from their 18-19 season.

If we take a look at the 20-21 season, the difference in fans of the top flights of these two sports in Italy is a ratio of 4.07. If we take a look at the 18-19 season, Serie A Calcio increases the gap to four and a half times being more popular. Both leagues are behind the broadcasting paywall. From that broadcast subscription revenue in the sports media market, during the 20-21 season, Serie A Calcio received a domestic broadcasting revenue of 486 and a half times of Lega Basket Serie A’s. So if their ratio of popularity is four or five in favour of top flight football, their ratio in domestic broadcast revenue is almost 500.

The reason behind this market imbalance is that broadcast subscription services do not pay from their subscription revenue based on the viewership each sports entity has. Instead they spare almost the entire subscription revenue they sit on, for football. The motive being the idea that subscription revenue is gathered when people change premium TV operators and football is the only sport that drives that significant change in subscriptions.

As a result, irrespective of how lazy or misplaced executives of basketball leagues and competitions might be, European basketball needs to break this market imbalance to drive up its broadcast revenues.

During the inaugural season of EuroLeague’s league format, 16-17, its cumulative television views was 46,4 million. This refers to views of live match broadcasts. And, crucially, it is the global count except for the omission of Greece, Turkey and China, in other words, three significant viewership markets of EuroLeague. In the following 17-18 EuroLeague season, that number was 50,6 million views. Again, omitting views from Greece, Turkey and China.

It is important to understand how these figures are counted. Nielsen, the American media company that has done the counting, takes the average viewership over the entire duration of a EuroLeague match, across all television markets except for Greece, Turkey and China and adds them up. So, the average views per match, excluding these three countries was 179.150 during the 16-17 season. The following season it was 194.615. I keep saying views, because this doesn’t necessarily count how many people have watched EuroLeague in these seasons. If you watched 45 EuroLeague matches during one of these seasons on television and if you are not in Greeece, Turkey or China, then you were most likely counted 45 times towards the 46,4 million or the 50,6 million figure. However, the measurement also only looks at average live viewership throughout the entire course of a match. Therefore it does not count how many people actually have seen that match either. Say, for a match that averaged 250k viewers through the entire telecast, north of 300k people might have seen that match on TV, due to viewers who some of it, only tuning for the final several minutes, etc. But the measurement only takes the average figure of 250k.

We are going to take a look at NBA’s cumulative television viewership numbers below, and they are also counted by Nielsen and the methodology of counting is the same. So that’s why I found it necessary to really explain the methodology in their counting. And ultimately it’s the same, so these are directly comparable numbers. One caveat is that we are going to compare the broadcast television views of NBA from United States only, whereas EuroLeague’s figures were international. In practical terms however, vast majority of NBA’s broadcast revenue comes from United States. About 3.7 billion US$ of NBA’s yearly revenue comes from the sum of television contracts in the United States. Chinese broadcasters contribute to NBA’s broadcast revenue with a few hundred million US$ as well, but NBA’s broadcast revenue from all the other markets is utterly insignificant. If the rest of their broadcast contracts were to suddenly vanish out of thin air, it wouldn’t even make a dent on the salary cap. On the flip side, EuroLeague is a popular sports entity in select markets, so its view count being global does not really matter especially considering three of its most significant markets are not even counted.

My estimation through calculating each of the 29 franchises’ (excluding Toronto whose local broadcasts are actually aired on Canadian national television) local television ratings for the 20-21 season resulted in a cumulative viewership of 140.741.888. Views on local broadcasts are not disclosed, only the ratings i.e. the households watching, that’s why an estimation is required. And this estimation was a result of a study I made a while back, which wasn’t particularly rigorous. I’d like to update the figure with a more rigorous estimation approach later on, which is going to take more time, however I’m quite sure the actual figure is within the 135-155 million range.

For nationally televised NBA telecasts however, we don’t need to estimate the views via ratings. Because these numbers are published. 167 national regular season telecasts of 20-21 had 1,34 million average viewership, which results in 223.780.000 cumulative views.

And 73 national telecasts in 2021 NBA play-offs had 3,7 million average viewership, which results in 270.100.000 cumulative views. That doesn’t include the finals which adds a further 69.190.000 cumulative views from free television broadcasts.

So for the 20-21 NBA season, we have a grand total of 703.811.888 views from television broadcasts of NBA in United States. The per match figure amounts to 664.600. But the cumulative figure matters more for the broadcast revenue and NBA’s ratio of cumulative views in the 20-21 season over EuroLeague’s 16-17 season is nearly 15.2 and over EuroLeague’s 17-18 season it is 13.9. Considering NBA has received about 3.7 billion US$ for this cumulative figure, holding that same ratio to EuroLeague would grant continental basketball’s top flight almost 244 million US$ for the 16-17 season and 266 million US$ for the 17-18 season. In reality, EuroLeague’s broadcast revenue was around €30 million in those seasons, even if nowadays at north of €40 million.

The Internal Threat to Club Basketball

External threats to European club basketball, although already well-known, were hopefully clarified in terms of how exactly and why they are threats. However the fragile ground that club basketball stands on, is not only threatened by external conditions. Perhaps the external threats target that brand of high level club basketball more specifically, but there is a potential internal threat that might target the entirety of club basketball.

If you noticed, when we put the undermonetisation of Lega Basket Serie A’s and EuroLeague’s broadcast revenues into numbers and ratios, the former’s undermonetisation is even more gross. Well, because, ever since EL’s league format was put into practice, its broadcast revenues have increased. But I also think it’s because the product simply carves out better engagement and more consumption out of its viewership base. That product is not something Lega Basket Serie A can offer, because they don’t have that high quality brand of collective basketball from top to the bottom of the league table like EuroLeague has. I reckon actually the lower basketball quality a team has, closer to NBA style of basketball they play in Europe, except with FIBA ruleset and at a slower pace. This isn’t to say NBA basketball is lower quality, I figure it just occurs as a result of similar squad mechanics stemming from different reasons. Nevertheless, I think the engagement & consumption from the side of general basketball fandom especially, is quite low when it comes to teams who do not carry the features of high level European basketball.

This reveals another potential threat then. If EuroLeague’s revenue is going to keep going up and up, and if domestic leagues are going to have stagnant revenues, regardless of how any external condition affects Euroball, that in and of itself is bound to destroy the club basketball structure. There are already multiple EuroLeague shareholder clubs whose managements want to break away from domestic leagues completely. It makes immediate financial sense for them, especially if they don’t see the potential of economic growth from their domestic leagues. EL clubs properly closing the league and being absent from their domestic competitions would certainly crush the club basketball structure as we know it. I am aware there are some amongst people who are only interested in EuroLeague, that want to see this happen. However it is obvious this would utterly ruin all the other significant, historically important and communally relevant basketball clubs and therefore as a basketball fan it is not something I can ever support.

To sum up, European basketball economy is lagging on a fragile ground, being succumbed by external conditions and having even more dangerous internal threats looming. The only way to resolve these issues is to cultivate the entire ecosystem. There are significant roadblocks on that path also, exactly none of this is even remotely straightforward. But as this piece already reached 6k words, the necessary framework of action to solve these externally present and immanently imminent issues is better off to be examined in another piece.

Snippets on Every EuroLeague Team at the Mid-point of the Regular Season

Usually I’m not much interested in writing in-general, on-the-surface quick pieces like this one. Usually you should expect content that delves into particular things. But I didn’t want to start off the blog with a very particular piece that focuses on a player or a team. Since the mid-point of the 2021-2022 EuroLeague Regular Season finished, with the first half of the fixtures wrapped up minus the postponed, that also creates an opportunity to start off with a general piece like this that welcomes snippets on every team. 

List is in alphabetical order. And all images are in credit to euroleague.net

Alba Berlin: The biggest change for the Berlin club in the latest off-season was Aíto García Reneses’s departure after building something very special in the four years he worked there. Reneses hasn’t quite retired, he officially is in sabbatical and his former assistant Israel Gonzalez has replaced him for the head coach position.

With a very peculiar attacking structure built by Reneses in his coaching twilight, filling in those shoes is no easy task. It is arguably easier to demolish what was built and start something very different, than trying to follow Reneses’s footsteps within a good amount of squad continuity. After a recent patch of good results, Alba Berlin doesn’t exactly look much different in overall performance than their previous couple EuroLeague seasons with Reneses.

Injuries have not been easy on them, especially at the start of the season when they were missing multiple key players. Marcus Eriksson’s return from injury has proven key to access some of their attacking oomph back again. Swedish shooting guard is scoring on ridiculous shot efficiency with 55/45/91 shooting splits and 67.4 true shooting %, similar to his 20-21 season. Otherwise newcomer Jaleen Smith hasn’t shown the necessary attacking aptitude to compensate for Simone Fontecchio’s departure to Baskonia. Yovel Zoosman has never displayed that type of talent as an attacker, he’s closer to a defensive specialist you’re content with if he doesn’t compromise your attack. Without Eriksson and Fontecchio, Alba Berlin’s creation has depended way too much on Maodo Lo and Luke Sikma early in the season. Eriksson’s off-the-ball movement brings another dimension to Berlin’s attacks, adding to Maodo Lo leveraging the threat of his off-the-dribble shot-making using ball screens and Luke Sikma’s passing and playmaking out of half-court setups where he is used away from the basket. That results in three major dimensions to Alba Berlin’s set offence, via one player each in guard, wing and big positions all.

In that aspect, Maodo Lo – Marcus Eriksson – Yovel Zoosman – Luke Sikma – Oscar da Silva is an interesting five for them, and one of the lineups I am most intrigued to watch across the entire EuroLeague. This is a lineup that they’ve utilised to break away in Bundesliga matches, in crunch time or otherwise. The problem at EuroLeague level is that Sikma and da Silva constitutes a questionable defensive pairing at the most important positions for defence. But nevertheless, Alba Berlin under Reneses’s watch at its best and its most, has been a team that shows off splendid attacking power even at the expense of being a bad defensive team. That expense has prevented them to compete at EuroLeague playoffs level perhaps, but if you are sticking to the Reneses era Alba without Reneses, boosting your attacking at the expense of your defence with your lineup management is on brand. Gonzalez is following Reneses’s footprints, but he has differed in some aspects. And that is not a criticism, for instance trying to replicate Reneses’s specific match plans on the defensive side of the ball could result in worsening things. This is an Alba Berlin lineup I’m looking forward to watch more of in the 2nd half of the season though.

Anadolu Efes: Reigning champion has managed to close the first half of the regular season with a winning record (9-8) and in the last quarter-finals spot in the standings, by winning 7 out of their last 9 matches following an awful start to the season.

All technical examination to follow, it really has to be said that Efes’s fixtures were a lot easier towards the back end and were a lot tougher at the beginning. They perhaps did not perform as badly as their results suggested at the beginning of the season and they perhaps did not perform as greatly as their results suggest at the back end of the year.

Still, there is no doubt that the defending champs have regressed in their performance. At the beginning, Efes’s regression was characterised by a defensive regression, suggesting the newcomer Filip Petrušev was the main culprit. Can’t exactly say this was a very wrong diagnosis either. Petrušev hasn’t displayed strong resistance as the essential paint defender, has shown some very problematic aversion to rebounding and perhaps to the physicality he has to face as a EuroLeague defender at the 5; all the while showing impressive attacking talent. But Bryant Dunston starting the season slow was also an important factor. It wasn’t just that Petrušev replaced Sertaç Şanlı and all the defensive regression Efes experienced at the centre position stemmed from that change. 20-21 Bryant Dunston might not have been prime Dunston as a defender, but until recently Dunston this season was defending at a level far away from the 20-21 version. Efes’s latest EuroLeague win against Crvena Zvezda in a thrilling game at home, has showcased not even 20-21 Dunston levels, but peak Bryant Dunston levels of a defensive performance from the man himself and while it’s not realistic to expect Dunston to defend on that level consistently for the 2nd half of the season, that is a very encouraging sign for Efes to be able to go on a championship charge in 2022 akin to last season’s.

Another element to Efes’s defensive improvement is Tibor Pleiß having a career best season as an attacker, which gradually increased the German’s minutes and allowed coach Ergin Ataman to lessen Petrušev’s, using the Serb in smaller doses. Pleiß is not an ideal defender at the 5 himself and can’t match Şanlı’s 20-21 performance there, but isn’t detrimental to Efes defence as much as Petrušev was. Emphasis on the last word, because what’s also worth mentioning is that Petrušev has slightly improved as a defender as the season progressed, being a better or a less worse defender after not being the top minute getter in Efes’s centre rotation.

On the offensive side of the ball, reigning season and Final Four MVP Vasilije Micić’s performance has been discussed a lot. I imagine most would concur he hasn’t played at his MVP form from 20-21. One statistic that draws attention is that so far he is averaging the same amount of turnovers as he did in the previous two EuroLeague seasons: 3.1. But in 19-20 he averaged 5.8 assists a match and in 20-21, 4.9 assists. This regular season at its mid-point the reigning MVP is at 3.6 assists. In 18-19 season his stats stood at 5.5 assists to 2.8 turnovers per match. I don’t find a great deal of correlative value between assists and turnovers per se, but I do find the assist to turnover ratio to be important. If only because, I feel that when praising performances of especially the perimeter creators, assist averages sometimes are used to prop up the value of the player as a passer without accounting for the usage amount of the player. That’s why I think assist to turnover ratio is important, even if the assists as events and turnovers as events in game play don’t necessarily correlate very well to each other in my view. In any case, 3.6 to 3.1 is not pretty.

That all to be said, I think what held back Efes’s attacking production the most was Kruno Simon’s absence, rather than Micić not fully operating back on MVP form. Micić is still close enough to that form that he can have a better second half of the season, like he did in 20-21, and maybe possibly even surpass his 20-21 season performance overall. But Simon being absent took away a dimension from Efes’s attack much like Eriksson’s absence did for Alba Berlin. Ataman’s offence with this core squad is a very systematic one. Eventually I’m bound to produce a long video to explain why the characterisations of Efes offence to the contrary are mistaken and just how utterly systematic of an attack theirs has been across multiple seasons. I actually had already finished a medium length video going over the principles that unleash Efes’s dominant attack after their 18-19 season to be published before the 19-20 season. But that was one of the videos I refer to in the about page of this blog that I wasn’t able to publish in time because of technical problems. Nevertheless, such an overview will need to be a lot more comprehensive because of all that happened since then, but the core principles that makes Efes such a historically dangerous attacking team are the same. In some senses, stars need to be aligned to build something like this. But even before Ataman ever built an offence this dangerous, he always has been a coach that has been said to be using, or even having to use, same type of players in some specific positions that undertake similar/same type of tasks. Anadolu Efes cannot showcase their lethal offensive output on the long run, without Simon’s creativity at the 3. Quite literally a lot of Ataman’s sets and Efes’s playbook become useless without Simon’s presence. As mentioned in the Alba Berlin snippet, their dimensions of creativity are easier to differentiate, spanning 3 players across all three of guard, wing, big positions. And they’re all creators in very different ways. Perhaps because Efes’s creation is so ball-screen and perimeter creator oriented that, their offence is rather seen as this non-systematic, individualistic structure. However when Kruno Simon is injured, their offence lacking a full dimension of creation is a visible evidence to just how systematic and inflexible their attacking system is. It’s as fluid of an attacking style as it gets, but fluidity regarding the contents of the system is not relevant to flexibility of the system itself. The principles that unlock Efes’s all-time lethal creation are the preliminary half-court movements which they optimise to make their creation as unstoppable as possible. And in classic Ergin Ataman fashion, as people have noted over the years, his offences need the presence of the most significant players to the structure, moreso than other offensive systems and how much they need the most significant players to their structure. That is no exception for Ataman’s magnum opus and that is why when Efes is in full force, their unrelenting attacking output is a scary sight for all opponents.

AS Monaco: I have to mention, the idea to produce written content and to actually go through with it by buying this domain name and so on, had come to me after I was unable to publish a relatively long video examining Mike James’s underwhelming start to the season whilst Monaco was doing well. So that the next time I am unable to upload a video that I made, I’d be able to quickly publish it in written form.

The plot thickened with the argument AS Monaco’s star and the Montenegrin head coach had in November at Efes away:

And again this month right before Monaco and Zvezdan Mitrović parted ways:

 

I think Zvezdan Mitrović is a EuroLeague calibre coach and I also think his performance this season was good when Mike James hasn’t performed up to par as the expected leading force for this Monaco side. On the other hand, there are only 18 spots so being a EuroLeague calibre coach doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all in EuroLeague sometimes. And that Olimpia Milano match was Monaco’s 5th consecutive loss, so even if the Monaco management has sided with James over their head coach unlike CSKA Moscow and Olimpia Milano, it wasn’t an abrupt decision. Perhaps it would be so if there was no rift between Mitrović and any one of his players, considering Monaco’s pleasantly surprising start to the season performing above expectations. But I don’t think changing your head coach after five EuroLeague losses can be defined as an abrupt decision when there is such a visible rift involved. EuroLeague history is a witness to teams winning despite rifts in the dressing room, but it’s a situation that can be maintained without making any management move only when you are winning.

Monaco has a mediocre attack and defence both. They have talented defenders (Alpha Diallo is a gem), but enough shortcomings on the squad to not be outright good on that end. I think the coaching change was a good management decision in that sense. Because considering their star creator has underwhelmed thus far, if there is one way to shoot up from mediocrity on either side of the ball, it is more probable to come from their offence if they manage to get expected performance level from James. Furthermore, one possible upside to mid-season coaching changes that remains constant is, the departing coach’s work always remains at some level with the team. If the departing coach was contributing to several different aspects well, rather than, you know, somehow putting in a terrible performance which usually doesn’t happen at EuroLeague level, then it is a positive upside for that team. Because you can perhaps fix things that were not working with the coaching change, whilst retaining the positive contributions that the departing coach had. Monaco has that possible upside here, if they could get expected value out of Mike James after the coaching change, along with retaining what they have, at least their offensive output might escape from mediocrity.

ASVEL: French powerhouse draws attention with its stunning backcourt duo, Elie Okobo and Chris Jones, who performed arguably second only to Efes’s backcourt in the first half of the regular season. With a strong start to the season, and a 8-9 record just shy of the final quarter-final spot in the standings despite a -86 point differential (ranks 14th in the league), they seemed to have overperformed. That is, of course, always a praise and hardly ever a criticism, in any competitive, performative setting. ASVEL is not any significant historical exception here, under the existent league format, EuroLeague table hasn’t really been a perfect representation of point differentials. The entry battle to quarter-finals has been insanely close almost every season, so each win and loss is inarguably vital and eking out wins in crunch time like ASVEL has managed to do, is more than welcome. Elie Okobo’s crunch time heroics have been an entertaining element to this EuroLeague season.

With that being said, ASVEL’s offensive production standing at 105 points per 100 possessions, a EuroLeague 15th mark per hackastat.eu, is not exactly surprising. ASVEL’s creation almost entirely depends on their terrific backcourt duo and those two excel as creators via shot-making more than anything else. They are special shot makers indeed, however at EuroLeague level, having an offence depend on two guards who themselves depend on their shot-making to be creators is a bit of a risky, and a low margin endeavour.  David Lighty’s absence has been brutal for ASVEL for this reason, as he is one of the most effective creators out of the post in the competition. Thus Lighty’s presence does not only add another creator to the mix for ASVEL, but an interior creator that would be able to deepen ASVEL’s offence more than just any third creator. Lighty should recover from his broken hand injury next month, so that’s something to monitor whether ASVEL will get back on track again, improving on the offensive side of the ball.

Barcelona: Make no mistake, this Barça side that we have seen, is not all that similar to last season’s team. They’ve played at a level only their November 2020 could match from last season. Right now they are, they have to be named as, the clear favourite for the title based on the first half of the regular season.

When Jasikevičius replaced Pešić, the prevalent assumption was Pešić was washed up and had no idea what he was doing and that Šaras would be able to instantly improve Barcelona’s offence. Whilst agreeing that Jasikevičius is a considerable improvement, this was a position I was in disagreement with.

Judging the performance of coaches by their sideline demeanour is something that, perhaps the larger, general basketball viewership base cannot drop, but the ones who are actively engaging in the discourse of basketball most definitely should drop. I think Pešić’s performance in his latest Barça stint has been the victim of that. He is an old man with a snarky know-it-all attitude, doesn’t talk much or give series of overt instructions during timeouts, doesn’t have a frenetic sideline presence. All the symbolic signs point to a washed up old man who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yet that is such an unbelievably poor way to judge a coach’s work, it’s almost like trying to observe an engineer or an architect’s work demeanour and how they look and how they behave to come up with a conclusion regarding their work performance, instead of actually looking at the buildings they designed or things they engineered to judge their performance.

All that considered, Pešić still failed to build any offensive system for the 19-20 team. My position in the summer of 2020 was that, it’s not that Pešić did not fail, but the idea that it is a no biggie to create any sort of comprehensive, well-optimised offence for this Barcelona squad was completely out of touch. It was an extremely challenging task that Pešić failed at. That extremely deep, stacked Barcelona squad was not built thoughtfully with fits in consideration. The potential of an offence cannot be determined by adding up the individual quality of players in the squad, how all those players can be possibly fit together as parts of a multi-dimensional singular system is as much, if not more, crucial. Barcelona’s squad, despite most probably being the best one, was also probably the only EuroLeague squad so thoughtlessly gathered by throwing money at names instead a squad building that was engineered as due with squad construction.

Nick Calathes’s transfer to the Catalan side further complicated things while at the same time adding further quality to the squad. I was only talking about the 19-20 team. But Calathes’s transfer only further deepened that case of Barcelona’s squad construction, where they added another big name, high quality player with questionable fit to the squad at hand even though they actually needed a point guard. But one more element to their squad that improves its already stellar quality was also another element that worsened its squad construction and made the task of building an offensive system even tougher. And last season I think we witnessed exactly that, with Calathes becoming predictably one of the best players of the team, at the same time as his massive on/off stats being quite problematic for a team that talented. Because only in the absense of a comprehensive, multi-dimensional attacking system, a super floor raiser like Calathes might fill up that big void and become as essential to the team’s attacking output as he was to Panathinaikos teams he raised the floors of to great success before. That however, is neither a worthy attacking output of that Barcelona squad, nor sufficient to wear the continental crown, if you don’t have a historically dominant defence. And truly great as Barcelona’s defence was, it wasn’t historically dominant.

Now, with all this context in mind, here comes the results. Per hackastat.eu, 19-20 Barça under Pešić scored 116.4 points per 100 possessions in the 28 EuroLeague matches they played before the season was shut down, 7th best mark in the competition and 2.8 points per 100 better than EuroLeague average. Indeed, Barça’s scoring output implies Pešić’s failure to build an offensive system because that squad should not be 2.8 points per 100 possessions higher than EuroLeague average no matter what. 20-21 Barça under Jasikevičius on the other hand, scored 115.8 points per 100 possessions in the 34 regular season appearances, 6th best mark in the competition and 2.4 points per 100 better than EuroLeague average.

Why am I talking about Barcelona’s previous two seasons instead of an overview on their first half of the 21-22 EL Regular Season and an outlook on their 2022? Because they’ve done it. They’ve done it this season. Jasikevičius and the players have overcome the arduous challenge of having a comprehensive, multi-dimensional, well-optimised, encompassing attacking system with this thoughtlessly gathered super stacked squad. I might cite their ridiculous scoring output per 100, which is well ahead the 2nd and 3rd best numbers at the mid-point of the regular season, but I’m not going to do so. Because this difference I’m referring to, between what they lacked in previous two seasons and what do they have now, is not even exactly captured by the difference in their per possession scoring metrics. When it comes to winning EuroLeague, playing basketball worthy of wearing that crown, that difference is reflected onto the durability of your attacking output given its necessary comprehensive scope, and that is not even necessarily well-captured by the difference in per possession scoring output. Because that difference between winning the title and failing in the playoffs is slight in quantity anyhow. So a slight difference in per possession output would not mean the qualitative difference that you can observe as the viewer is not night and day. Excuse the double negative, but that’s why I don’t think Barcelona’s super offensive rating right now is even worth citing.

So, with all this lengthy recent context behind to really hit home how special what Barcelona has managed to do in this first part of the season, two things to look forward to in 2022 are, in case Efes goes on another championship charge in the remaining part of the season, like last season, how well 21-22 Barcelona with its enhanced attack respond back? And Calathes has been sidelined since November, but he should return back to play soon enough, so as an attacker, how well he’s going to mesh with what Barcelona has showcased in his absence?

Baskonia: Baskonia during Duško Ivanović’s third stint at the club was a bit wonky in terms of game performance and results. Their biggest success during that time was obviously the 19-20 Liga ACB championship, achieved in a spectacular manner in 2020 Fase Final, which the league organised to conclude the season after it was shut down for obvious reasons in March. However, Ivanović’s best work actually came with the following season. I don’t think losing a close playoff series to Valencia in the league is shameful, which was followed by Valencia losing a close series to Real Madrid in the semi-finals themselves. Although Baskonia could be faulted for not having a better regular season performance and losing home court advantage to Valencia in the playoffs. In EuroLeague, they finished 10th with a winning record and shared the fourth best point differential with Zenit. Did I mention how ludicrous the playoff entry race is in EuroLeague yet? That’s what the regular season is all about, the crazy playoff entry race and a slightly less crazy home court advantage battle, which makes the regular season brutally competitive where you see coaches draw up plays for the final possession of a match that they already won, being 9 points ahead with 10 seconds left.

But it was clear Ivanović’s performance wasn’t up to that level this season and the very particular set offence he built needed Pierria Henry’s passing and Achille Polonara’s screening, cutting, rebounding more than at least I myself realised. So perhaps it was time for a change, even if he might not have performed outright badly. Like I mentioned in AS Monaco’s section, that’s not often the case with mid-season coach departures in EuroLeague.

I’m not thrilled about the appointment of Neven Spahija, however. Yet there might still be things he can contribute to this team, while benefiting from the positive contributions of Ivanović that is felt on this team even this season. A big concern for me is that, even if Ivanović failed compared to his two previous seasons, arguably largely triggered by the departures of Pierria Henry and Achille Polonara, there were still multiple matches in which Baskonia looked very solid, with a different structure that centred around their super wingers, Rokas Giedraitis and Simone Fontecchio, both of whom are more than capable on either side of the ball. To the extend that Spahija could build on that, and to which amount that he insists on point guard oriented creation, should determine Baskonia’s prospects in 2022.

Bayern München: A worrisome reality for Bayern towards the end of 2021 is the fact that their offensive output completely faltered. Why worry? After all they are the most overperforming team of the previous season whose main strength was the defensive side of the ball, not the offensive, and they had just necessary amount of attacking output with a great amount of mid-range shooting to support that defence enough, to be able to put up a resilient fight to make it to Cologne. That’s all true. But this season Bayern’s productivity was falling on the attacking side of things, not defending. Whether that is worrisome for a Trinchieri team in and of itself can be disputed but it is certainly worrisome for this Trinchieri team that has this group of players. So their attacking output faltering towards the end of 2021 is a blatant alarming sign. If they are going to regress to the mean as an attacking team, they will have to get better as a defending team. And that is something I’m very curious of to see, so I’m not keeping Bayern’s section shorter because they are not as interesting, but because I believe the 2022 portion of their season will be more telling than maybe an odd, out-of-character 2021 portion of their season. But the remaining months will show whether that odd, out-of-character dynamic is their whole season or something they will grow out of.

Crvena Zvezda: Serbian powerhouse has been a personal joy to watch, playing a supremely entertaining hard nosed basketball that is stylistically unique in EuroLeague right now. They’ve had a few brutal losses, the last of which was the Efes loss on the road that wrapped up their first half of the regular season. Radonjić’s general set direction and crunch time lineup management probably didn’t exactly help in those close losses.

I think what makes their defence especially, so entertaining to watch, is the juxtaposition between Radonjić’s risky defensive schemes and the aforementioned hard nosed play style that they have. Normally these kinds of teams would be expected to defend in conservative schemes but Dejan Radonjić doesn’t care and goes for the jugular with daring defensive tactics. To a detriment, I could argue. It is well established that this Crvena Zvezda has been in the need of a solid centre ever since the season started. But building on that general need at the 5, they also are in desperate need of a solid centre because of the type of defence Radonjić has them playing and how unsuited Crvena Zvezda’s current centre rotation is to Radonjić’s defensive principles that they are applying. I still admire the practical work that Zvezda’s coaching staff pulled off, because you can see how much of a great job they are doing with the rest of the four defenders, when their centre who is unsuited to defend two-man games aggressively, defends them aggressively. They manage to shrink the court very well given the context of their aggressive defence. But the margins are brutal in EuroLeague and you can also see how sometimes the opponent scores, even in these possessions where they shrunk space well with optimal positioning to accompany their daring defensive tactics applied by their centres who are unfit to apply them. If they had at least one solid centre that is actually suited to play in this defensive setting, they could be in a more impressive spot.

Recent news in Serbian media report the club is in talks with Alan Williams, who recently impressed at Lokomotiv Kuban. But he also is recovering from a significant injury, so this transfer isn’t as surefire as it would be before Williams’s injury. Also notable is that Alan Williams too, shined as a defender in conservative schemes for Kuban, so even without health concerns there is still the question of whether he is actually suited to play in Crvena Zvezda’s daring schemes too. That is a matter of degree of course, because as this coaching staff has proven, they can bring up the level of even the defenders who are utterly unsuited to play in aggressive schemes. It’s just that as admirable of a work it is to bring someone like that up to an okayish level in that role, that doesn’t move the needle a whole bunch in this competition. So the coaching staff can clearly raise up Williams’s performance in aggressive defensive schemes if he ends up at Crvena Zvezda, but their starting point with him would be the crucial matter. That is of course, the same for any centre they could sign who hasn’t previously shown off as a defender in aggressive schemes.

CSKA Moscow: This snippet could have been one of the most stretched out in this article, but I’ll hold back on most things. The reason being, CSKA is clearly in the midst of a quite a chaotic state, not in the back end of that situation. Therefore a lot of the points that could be made regarding their performance and current situation are probably better off if held back right now because it is so much more recent and fresh for them, even if it was already building up to it.

I may also write an entire piece on just CSKA and Itoudis after we see the back end of this chaotic situation they are in right now, so holding back some things now would prevent being repetitive too.

It needs to be underlined how unlucky they are to have Nikola Milutinov experience another serious injury again and as Toko Shengelia missed considerable time too, suddenly their highest value area of the team, those two as their big men has vanished under their feet. But why then, this recent collapse hasn’t happened right there and then but since both of their star big men returned back to play? Both the UNICS Kazan loss at home and the loss against the astonishingly depleted Real Madrid were beyond embarrassing losses. These two losses were terrifying sights for CSKA, and the win in Berlin in between them wasn’t convincing at all.

Even though there is no actual break, perhaps completing the first half of the regular season will help them shake it off. But whether they manage to do that or not, there is no denying they’ve been a team with quality ingredients that haven’t been brought together all season long. It arguably has been Itoudis’s worst performance in his career, as CSKA has been functioning apart and in separate, like no other Itoudis team before.

Fenerbahçe:  The serious injuries Jan Vesely and Nando De Colo suffered at the latest match against ASVEL which will make them absent for several weeks each, coupled with the shorter injury time that Devin Booker is in, definitely changes how 2022 is looking for the Turkish side after their recent run of wins at the back end of the year.

An impressive, strong defence put together with an impressive transition attack that is lethal in counter-attacks, put together with a catastrophic set offence almost perfectly describes Fenerbahçe’s 2021 in this season across those three vectors.

Djordjevic has insisted in pairing Booker and Vesely together, drawing the hellfire in criticism of doing so and not utilising Polonara more. And let’s rewind that back.

In the off-season I was of the opinion that Polonara was an excellent transfer and Devin Booker was a meh one at best, but an okay back-up for Vesely at the 5. That’s obviously not how Djordjevic is using Booker, he has played him and Vesely together a lot. Mind you, my view has been in line with the general opinion that Booker was a meh transfer for Fener at best as the second centre behind Vesely, whereas his role is even bigger than that in reality. Naturally, if I expected his role to be bigger, my opinion on the Booker move would be lesser than meh. With the hellfire Djordjevic receives due to his usage of Booker and Polonara though, I’m not so much in line with, unlike my view on the transfers of these two players in the summer.

Djordjevic is unable to get proper value out of Polonara, that is a fact. He is one of the better 4s in EuroLeague yet his performance hasn’t been at that level for the Turkish club, and that is more on Djordjevic than it is on Polonara. So while I’m not in line with the criticism Djordjevic receives in this regard, one aspect of this dynamic that he might deserve the endless criticism is the fact that he hasn’t been able to incorporate Polonara to Fenerbahçe’s set offence.

But on the other hand, if you are disregarding, overlooking, underrating, and in any shape or form not giving the proper due to Devin Booker’s performance this season, just because you’ve had similar takes on and expectations of him before the season to mine, then your criticism loses its validity. Because not only Devin Booker has balled out on either side of the court, surpassing expectations and then some, he is also doing so by undertaking wildly different tasks than what he was doing at Khimki. That is the most impressive aspect of his performance, that, spanning from the type of defensive schemes he’s playing in to the entire attacking role he has in a radically different offensive structure, the kind of basketball he’s playing and expected to play by his coaches, could not possibly be any more different compared to his seasons at Khimki.

So, I understand the fascination with Polonara. While I think Baskonia’s set offence amplified his strengths as an attacker, even without it he’s still a premier power forward who has showcased his quality even with Italy this summer. I don’t think he’s a worse player than Booker right now, or anything of that sort. But holding onto off-season expectations like dear life, to a point where you falsely claim just Djordjevic playing Polonara more instead of Booker is going to be the thing that solves Fenerbahçe’s problems, is just not right. Because, and this is the key point, Djordjevic’s failure here is not the stubbornness on playing Polonara enough, but it is a failure of not being able to utilise Polonara in set offence even if/when he plays Polonara enough and with the right kinds of lineups. The energy that Polonara often installs to Fener’s attacking is just further boosting an already good transition attack, not simply solving the abysmal set offence. That abysmal set offence falls on Djordjevic and is not something that could be simply solved by playing Polonara more. And furthermore, Djordjevic not being able to utilise Polonara in set offence is only one of the shortcomings that made the set offence abysmal, not the only one.

The nuances within this fascinating and chaotic dynamic doesn’t even there either. There’s Polonara not helping his case by playing awful defence in some key matches when he’s subbed in, despite being a good defender in general. And another lazy criticism of Djordjevic, is the idea that Booker and Vesely together don’t work. That could only be described as a blatant denial of reality, when their high-low connection has been one of the only couple bright spots of Fener’s set offence at its absolutely lowest points this year. And that is only touching on the weaker side of the ball for those two. That, again, looks more like people holding onto their off-season takes and expectations for dear life, ignoring the material data presented out there on the battlefield. If someone had told me about Djordjevic’s plan to play Vesely and Booker together so much and asked me how effective do I think it would be, I would most definitely laugh it off. It’s worth reminding Fenerbahçe won its lone EuroLeague title by playing two centres that cannot shoot. So a superficial criticism on playing two centres that are not shooting threats is underthought at best. At EuroLeague level, even a team like ASVEL which plays lengthy minutes with a perimeter trio that is on average less than 190 cm tall, can play with an extremely tall Wembanyama & Fall lineup and reap its success in small doses. Shooting is the first, and by the virtue and reason of being the first, the most simplest solution to playing two 5s together. It is not the only solution though. And as long as you build a passing connection between your two non-shooting bigs, with clever positioning, timely cutting and offensive rebounding pressure, that is even a more durable approach to tackling the problem of playing two 5s together which is how Udoh and Vesely managed it and Vesely and Booker have done well also. The reason why I would laugh it off this summer, is that I just could not possibly envision Booker undertaking all these necessary tasks mentioned and then doing them well enough to make it work with Vesely. Not even close. But he has, and that is why his season has been so impressive and I’ve been proven so mistaken and if I don’t recognise that to hold onto my off-season opinions like dear life instead, ignoring what is actually going on out there, and whether Fener’s horrible set offence is actually all that relevant to playing two 5s together, I would be merely insisting on to continue to be mistaken about it.

Funny enough, as Fener has seen some slight uptick in set offence efficiency, they’ve been more lax regarding the principles on how to make Booker and Vesely work on attack. Booker has been casually spotting up more behind the arc. During that time, he shot 3s well, but over the long run and even when he’s shooting them well in general, it is not good for Fenerbahçe to stop being disciplined regarding the principles that make their dual-centre lineups worth playing. All this while Polonara will be putting in intense shifts with Vesely and Booker out. And then with Booker before Vesely returns. So while getting into quarters is too big of an ask from this point on for Fener with their two stars injured for several weeks, I think it’s safe to expect Polonara showcase his talent and form, much better in this context just because of his level, not because Djordjevic will suddenly figure out how to get high value out of him. But whether this period of play could result in Djordjevic using Polonara better once all their injured players return, is a different question and possibility to monitor when the rest of Fener’s season is probably going to be much more boring and much less chaotic than the first half.

Maccabi Tel Aviv: Most recently Maccabi lost to Hapoel Tel Aviv in embarrassing fashion at home in the Tel Aviv derby and afterwards news from Israel outright say that coach Ioannis Sfairopoulos is on the brink of losing his job and their upcoming fixture against AS Monaco is critical:

 

Meanwhile Maccabi finished the former part of the regular season with a seven match losing streak in EuroLeague.

There are parallels here to Olympiacos parting ways with coach Sfairopoulos in 2018 after losing in the EuroLeague quarter-finals to Žalgiris despite being the 3rd seed and having home court advantage and then losing Greek League finals series to archrival Panathinaikos.

What was revealed immediately afterwards Olympiacos’s decision was that Sfairopoulos was not necessarily underachieving but even overachieving with that team, on the back of the strength of the defence that he was able to help be built. So it wasn’t necessarily Sfairopoulos underperforming in the playoffs as much as overperforming during the regular season, given the tools he had to work with. And Olympiacos certainly lost other finals series against Panathinaikos in the league, despite being better than Panathinaikos during that season on the whole, even moreso than in the case of 17-18.

That is not exactly the case here. Maccabi’s losing streak is bleak and losing the Tel Aviv derby at home is indeed embarrassing. It is probably a  better time for Sfairopoulos’s employers to relieve him off his duties. But I am not letting go of the parallels with Olympiacos’s decision in 2018, because there are a lot of similarities in both situations thanks to Sfairopoulos’s consistency as a coach.

Ioannis Sfairopoulos is one of the best, if not the best, defensive organisers. He has proven he is able to build great defences without great defensive talent. His ability to organise a defence is a constant strength of his. Just as his relative inability to organise an efficient offence is also. That was the main problem at Olympiacos, there were loud complaints about how lifeless and lacklustre Olympiacos’s attack was even at a high spot as the 3rd seed in regular season and those were true. Greek head coach’s Maccabi Tel Aviv stint hasn’t developed any differently. With very impressive defensive work with not top class defensive talent, and lacklustre attacking.

The problem for Olympiacos then, and Maccabi now, is that their squads have a bunch of problematic elements that mostly pertain to their attacking talent. And parting ways with Sfairopoulos does not resolve those issues. It’s not necessarily hard to find and appoint a head coach who is better at on the attacking side of the ball. But doing so doesn’t get rid of the problematic elements of the squad.

This isn’t to say with a losing streak of seven in EuroLeague and after the loss in the Tel Aviv derby, Maccabi would be wrong to part ways with their head coach. But more of a warning that might not instantly improve Maccabi to a desired place.

Olimpia Milano: I do find 21-22 Olimpia Milano to be more impressive than the 20-21 team so far. 21-22 team is facing tougher competition and may or may not finish with a lower standing in the table when it’s all done and settled, than the 20-21 team. But regardless of that the basketball they’ve displayed this season has been more impressive.

First and foremost, what matters the most, is that this Milano side is getting a better performance out of Ettore Messina. And that is reflected onto their strengths, being one of the best defences in EuroLeague this season with mediocre attacking output. If we look at Messina’s championship teams, Messina in his prime prevailed with all-time, historically incredible, dominant defences. He’s not at the prime of his career anymore so maybe this team is not at that level defensively and maybe the age of the some important players also factors into that. But this is still a great defensive team in EuroLeague and therefore much more up Messina’s alley than the previous Olimpia Milano teams he has coached in this chapter of his career.

Dinos Mitoglou’s injury has been tough on them because he has started the season super strong. It was a great off-season signing that was somehow even better in practice than at least I imagined. His return will be very important to Milano’s season. What we briefly saw from him this season is impact both as an attacker and a defender that gives a visible boost to Milano. But it is not only a matter of when he returns but how he will return also, because of the significance of his injury, having to undergo surgery.

Milano is a strong Final Four contender. But I imagine most would agree that they are not quite there as a championship contender. I think the gap there is due to the fact the dynamic between the rather mediocre attacking efficiency and the great but not dominant defence. Like I already mentioned above, Messina’s teams were able to wear the EuroLeague crown, generally speaking, with historically dominant and all-time great defences and perhaps rather mediocre attacking efficiency that relied on star creators and scorers. But if and when the defence takes a couple steps back from an otherworldly level to a great on the season but not historically special level, much like 21-22 Olimpia Milano, then you don’t get to be a strong title contender.

Not getting a good amount of value out of Jerian Grant and Troy Daniels ties their hands behind their back in terms of having better attacking efficiency. But both of them were risky signings in the first place. Still, if one of them worked out well for the Italian powerhouse, it would add a great deal of fresh air to the team, improve their efficiency offensively and ease up pressure on Sergio Rodríguez who is getting old with a lot of basketball mileage and Malcolm Delaney who is younger at 32 years old, to become 33 in March, but more prone to injury.

Olympiacos: The most scary thing about Olympiacos’s season is the fact that they started the season as one of the best defensive teams but by the end of the first half of the regular season, their offence ranks about even with Efes’s and only a couple steps behind Barcelona. It is likely Efes climbs up further, but Olympiacos having the best attacking output after Barcelona and Efes would still be exceedingly impressive. Having this kind of potential on both sides of the ball and actually reflecting it into their play through this campaign makes them a really dangerous team.

They actually rank first in net rating, that is, the difference between their per possession scoring output and per possession defensive success. They finished the first half of the regular season as both the second best attack and second best defence in EuroLeague. Their net rating of 13 barely, probably within statistical margin of error, is ahead of Barcelona’s 12.9 and ahead of Real Madrid’s 10.7. Their attacking output is decently better than Real Madrid’s and their defensive efficiency is decently better than Barcelona’s.

Bartzokas is doing something we don’t see from EuroLeague teams. It is more common in lower levels. He splits the players into different lineup units and there’s not that much crossing between them. For example, for guards, Thomas Walkup and Tyler Dorsey mostly play together and Kostas Sloukas and Giannoulis Larentzakis mostly play together. Moustapha Fall mostly plays together with Sasha Vezenkov as the interior tandem and someone like Georgios Printezis hardly ever plays with those two, if ever, for example. This is something that is quite unique in EuroLeague, so even if the team that is applying these separate units of lineups was not doing well, it would still be one of the most interesting and worth following storylines of the season. I am eager to see how it is going to all work out in the playoffs. Bartzokas isn’t as strict on keeping lineups as separate as possible, as he was in the earlier part of the season. But there is still a very set lineup philosophy here and what is definitely worthy of praise is the thought that goes into who plays with whom, because when you take a look at it, Bartzokas and his staff hit the nail on the head with fits. It is an unusual practice to juggling a squad that has maximised this Olympiacos side so well, I am almost wondering where would CSKA Moscow stand, with their own squad that could definitely use separated lineup patterns. Can’t say this for many EuroLeague winning coaches but it seemed like this season has been Bartzokas’s best work, better than the 12-13 championship season.

Perhaps the most easily noticeable weaker point of this Olympiacos squad is the wings. They are playing guards at the 2 and their 4s are pure power forwards, not combo forwards or 3s that could slide down to 4. Kostas Papanikolaou and Shaq McKissic are kind of alone as the team’s small forwards in terms of wing men in the squad. That’s why Olympiacos looks a lot more impressive, on a legitimate title contender level when at least one of those two wingers perform at a high level. The recent dominance of Olympiacos at home also saw Kostas Papanikolaou play fantastic basketball on either side of the ball and it is something that propels Olympiacos so much, to get that kind of impact from a proper winger.

Panathinaikos: Personally, Panathinaikos is the most boring team in EuroLeague this season. It’s not because they are even a tier worse than the worst teams in the competition or anything like that, they are not. But at the end of the day, the foreigners they’ve been signing are just not good enough overall for this level. They are in a tough spot with the ownership publicly announcing intention and even price to sell the club, but without selling the club yet. So the club is stuck in this limbo where the owner who is supposedly looking to sell is not putting money into the club, but is not selling the club also, so there is no new ownership on the horizon that would start putting money into club budget. Not to mention, this self-sustaining budget and Diamantidis-Alvertis led management could not come at a worse time because they’ve been deprived from gate receipts. If they embarked upon this self-sustaining journey after a season in which they received proper amounts of revenue from gate receipts, with how OAKA is for PAO, the budget would be bigger and could lead to a more exciting team even if they most likely wouldn’t be very close to playoffs.

Priftis is doing some intriguing stuff and taking some risks. I just hope he’s not going to be prematurely let go because I believe both Vovoras and Kattash were prematurely let go. They were at least hasty decisions given Panathinaikos’s situation. It is not a coach’s fault that Panathinaikos has been stuck in this administrative limbo.

Not to finish without saying anything performance related as well, Papagiannis has been playing well lately following a poor form to start the season. If they could use his defensive presence in the paint, getting some stops in OAKA and out in transition, they’ll be able to continue to overperform at home. This is a formula that has made Panathinaikos one of the better performers at home across Europe, relative to team’s overall strength, for the last few years. Extending back to even late Calathes seasons, Panathinaikos found success in OAKA that way, despite having better player quality than they have right now.

Real Madrid: With easily the best defensive output of Tavares-era Real Madrid defences, Real Madrid is positioned as a dangerous title contender once again, even if not the frontrunner of the season.

After seasons in which the team’s defensive strength is entrusted with Tavares’s dominance more than anything else, ironicly or maybe expectedly, the best Real Madrid defence in Tavares’s time in Madrid is the one that relies the least on him. But even further, it may be subject to change in the remaining part of the season, but so far there is a strong argument to be made this has been the worst season for Tavares as a defender in all his Real Madrid seasons. Even with a decline in individual performance, he is still a stupid good defender of course, still inarguably the best defender on the team and he is still the anchor of this monster Real Madrid defence.

Adam Hanga’s transfer helps them very much. After Facu’s departure, Madridistas didn’t have a perimeter defender who can defend two-man games without leaving most of the work to Tavares. They found that player in Hanga. Jeffery Taylor has lost a step or two and he doesn’t guard the ball often. Rudy Fernandez is still somehow a brilliant defender, which is amazing considering how the old Real Madrid core is faring on that end. Felipe Reyes retired. Nobody knows what Jaycee Carroll is up to but defence has never been his strong suit even in his prime anyway. Sergio Llull has been a weak defender ever since his ACL injury. I mentioned Jeffery Taylor’s slight regression already and we are yet to see how much defensive help Anthony Randolph will be able to give after just returning from a severe injury. Rudy Fernandez is still a top notch defender. But he is limited in scope, so it was Adam Hanga who proved instrumental to provide Real Madrid with a more resistant point of attack defence.

On the more collective and technical side, instead of the individual and talent side, what makes Real Madrid’s defensive work so impressive this season is the precision of the stunts they are executing, shrinking the space for opposing creators without leaving their own assignments open. They are always on their toes and in their defensive stances. Weak side and strong side defenders are both required. And all the wingers in the squad have been instrumental in making these deadly stunts.

Anthony Randolph returning to competition a couple weeks ago is definitely a significant development for Spaniards. It is a crucial question to be answered, in the prospects of Real Madrid’s title hopes across all competitions, how much of that two-way Anthony Randolph impact they are going to see from him post-injury.

UNICS Kazan: Now, this is something remarkable. They’ve become the story of this first half of the regular season, have they not? Do you remember their Fenerbahçe away? Me neither.

It is hard to find a team that has maximised its defensive talent to this degree. Tonye Jekiri is very good, but he is not in the very first tier of defenders at the 5. John Brown III, with all the deserved appreciation and hype he is getting, and honestly that goes back to last season as well but reached a different level of all around praise for him with this EuroLeague showing, is a fantastic defender. But he is not in that top tier of defenders at the 5 either. Nevertheless, having two interior defenders on the level of Tonye Jekiri and John Brown III is still a luxury. But then the rest of the defensive talent doesn’t exactly fall in line with the overall defensive level at which the team is performing.

Lorenzo Brown, Mario Hezonja and Marco Spissu are solid. Brown and Spissu both excel in pressing the ball. The first line of defensive pressure Kazan puts on starts with them. Vyacheslav Zaytsev is actually a special defensive talent that they have on the squad but he basically is not a part of the rotation in this team. But they are not getting strong defensive contribution from their power forwards and Isaiah Canaan provides a defensive weakness for them to cover. And yet…

Where Real Madrid defence’s positioning and movement shine is in the stunt helps that they are so precisely executing, where UNICS Kazan defence’s positioning and movement shines is instead the pressure on the ball and rotation patterns they are committing to. Pressure on the ball is not just present from their point guards, but it is embedded into their two-man game defence also. In those schemes they press the ball with their bigs, instead of their guards. So between Brown, Spissu, Jekiri and Brown, Velimir Perasović has put the best defenders in the team up to the main task of giving hell to opposing creators. That is clever talent optimisation. But more significant work, where perhaps this should fall apart somewhat but doesn’t, happens at set defence after they press the ball. Overhelping is one of the biggest causes why defences concede points in volume and UNICS Kazan is perhaps the team that overhelps the least. In aggressive defensive schemes like the ones they are using, it’s much easier to fall into the trap of overhelping and conceding baskets only because of it. Instead they manage to be committed, disciplined to an unnatural degree and achieved remarkable success because of it.

Žalgiris: They’ve just been unlucky with Emmanuel Mudiay. Similar to Panathinaikos, gate receipts is a more essential revenue source for them than most other clubs with both how Žalgirio Arena is and also similar to Panathinaikos, Žalgiris needs to break even too. But unlike Panathinaikos, it is not because they are stuck in administrative limbo, it’s just generally the ownership situation for the Lithuanian powerhouse. Deprived of gate receipts when budgeting their season, they take a risk in Mudiay. If it pays off, and he is one of the better guards in EuroLeague, it is a signing that could propel Žalgiris to overperformance. Mudiay then could have signed with a different EuroLeague club in the summer for higher wages, but that would simply mean Mudiay overperformed his Žalgiris wage and the risk paid off for the club. Instead Mudiay played terribly on both sides of the ball and left Žalgiris after a few appearances. That is the essential difference between the size of budgets. It is not that teams’ performances are actually bound to their budgets. Teams could overperform or underperform their budget for a limitless amount of reasons. The essential importance between the size of budgets is instead, the margin of error for low budgeted teams is small. When teams which have high budgets make risky transfers and they don’t pay off, it hurts them but they have a bigger margin of error and they’re still relatively fine. But when Žalgiris is operating on this small budget, with hardly any revenue from gate receipts, and they make the decision to take a risk in someone like Mudiay and burn an important portion of their resources on that decision, how that risky signing pans out for the team dramatically affects their competitiveness and could make or break their season.

Josh Nebo, on the other hand turned out to be a fantastic signing. They actually have one of the most intriguing centre rotations in the league between him and the youngster Marek Blaževič who has shown improvement. Then there’s Joffrey Lauvergne who revitalised his career in Kaunas. He is expected to return from injury in a month or so, and if he returns fit, I am looking forward to see if Jure Zdovc starts playing two centres together, because their rotation at the 4 is nowhere close to how deep they’ll become at the 5. That said, it requires a dramatic change in their identity of play. And sure, while Žalgiris can afford the risk of that because their output isn’t sufficient as it is, it’s still a dramatic mid-season change in game identity to pull off.

Zenit St Petersburg: Kevin Pangos received hefty praise for his performance last season, was a big time performer when Zenit threw the kitchen sink at Barcelona in the quarter-finals, made All-EuroLeague first team, was rewarded with a lucrative NBA contract. And he deserved all that. Zenit, on the other hand, chose Shabazz Napier to replace Pangos. Napier is yet to appear in EuroLeague for Zenit. And the St Petersburg side finished the first half of the regular season with a 11-6 record, fourth in the standings. Could just end Zenit’s section with these facts only, because that’s nuff said, is it not? I would honestly not cut Zenit this short, just to be fair and expand a bit on their season also. But I don’t expect them to be as successful in the second part of the season, so if I prolong their section then I am going to feel like taking some shine away from what they’ve achieved, by being not as much optimistic on the remaining portion of their EuroLeague campaign as the feel-good 2021 they’ve had. There is of course, the missing Napier equation. Their actual Pangos replacement is yet to play in EuroLeague and that could change things every which way when he returns to play and swing Zenit’s momentum in a totally different direction. In any case, we ought to tip our imaginary hats for Xavi Pascual.