Anadolu Efes 75-59 Besiktas: A Win Built From the Paint

In the sixth minute of the first quarter, Bruno Fernando caught the ball fewer than two metres from the rim. Ante Zizic was already there — right man, right stance, both hands straight up. The ball still kissed the glass and dropped through. No roar from the stands was loud enough to make a television viewer take notice, and in the end-of-game highlight reel that possession will pass in under two seconds. And yet it was the first signal that Anadolu Efes were going to win this Istanbul derby along a path completely different from the one Besiktas had prepared to block.

I watched the first quarter three times before sitting down to write. Not because the action was especially complex, but because I wanted to be certain that what I had just seen was real. I have seen what others miss — and I have also seen things that were not there. That lesson arrived in 2026 and it still holds every time I open a game to take it apart.

Context: two offences warming up slowly

Both Anadolu Efes and Besiktas walked into this game shooting poorly. That is a familiar EuroLeague opening, where defences typically arrive two or three minutes ahead of offences. But the two teams handled that dead stretch in completely different ways.

Besiktas chose to attack the rim directly. Berk Ugurlu repeatedly drove the ball to the basket, Ante Zizic caught it in the paint and tried to manufacture close-range attempts. It was a logical choice: when the perimeter goes cold, go get points where the odds are best.

Anadolu Efes chose otherwise. The hosts used Bruno Fernando as an anchor in the paint, feeding the ball inside early to force Besiktas's defence to collapse, and only then opening up the perimeter. David Mutaf showed up in exactly the right spots during this stretch, providing a source of scoring that required very little ball. And when the first quarter closed at 20-16 for Efes, the notable thing was not the four-point margin but the fact that Efes had earned most of those points from precisely the area Besiktas trusted most.

That is the detail the box score does not tell you. Basketball is not only numbers. It is the stories numbers do not know how to tell.

The second quarter: Besiktas shot better and fell further behind

In the second quarter, Besiktas's picture changed noticeably. Anthony Brown hit threes in succession, Wenyen Gabriel brought energy off the bench and kept the visitors in the game. Watching only that stretch, you would think Besiktas had found their formula.

But Anadolu Efes had an answer. Jordan Loyd, Santiago Yusta and Daron Russell entered the flow one by one, and it was Russell who cut off the visitors' momentum with consecutive buckets. Make no mistake: Besiktas scored better in the second quarter, and yet the gap on the scoreboard grew wider. This is a paradox I have run into many times across more than two decades of watching European basketball — a team that plays the better quarter can still be pushed further away, if its opponent scores more efficiently per possession.

The end of the first half belonged to Dario Saric. He appeared at both ends: stealing the ball, then finishing himself at the other end. Besiktas answered with a Furkan Korkmaz three and Santiago Yusta's points from the free-throw line, but Saric's final basket before the buzzer sent Efes into the locker room with a 46-37 lead.

Nine points. That is what the second quarter left behind, and it matters more than any three-point statistic in this game.

The third quarter: Mike James shut the door

If the second quarter was a tug of war, the third was the moment Mike James decided this game did not need to be dragged out any longer. He scored himself and repeatedly set up Ercan Osmani and Bruno Fernando. It was during this stretch that the lead stretched to 17 points.

It is worth reading carefully how those 17 points were built. Not through a lucky barrage of long shots. They were built through a chain of decisions: James drawing the defence up top, then delivering the ball down low to cutters. Besiktas tried to respond through Ante Zizic and Conor Morgan, but both produced individual points rather than points inside a rhythmic offensive sequence. When the third quarter ended at 75-59, the outcome was effectively settled.

The fourth quarter was the easiest to watch and the least informative. Erkan Yilmaz and Santiago Yusta pushed the margin to 20. Furkan Korkmaz and Berk Ugurlu kept scoring for Besiktas, but those points no longer had the power to change the result. Efes walked through the closing minutes with the ease of a team that knew it had already won.

The contrarian read: Anthony Brown's threes were a bad sign

This is where I want to slow down, because I think most people are misreading this game.

The popular narrative will be: Besiktas lost because they shot poorly from three, only Anthony Brown could make shots, and Efes won on depth. That story sounds reasonable, and it is convenient for a headline.

But it skips a detail: Brown's threes were themselves a signal that Besiktas had been forced to abandon their original plan. That plan was to attack the paint through Ugurlu and Zizic. When the plan stopped producing enough points, the visitors had to live on long-range shots — a high-variance diet that cannot be sustained across 40 minutes.

In other words, the three was not Besiktas's weapon in this game. It was the fallback. And a team forced to live on its fallback for more than a quarter and a half is almost certain to break.

A second, more counter-intuitive read: the real hinge of this game was not the third quarter. It was the final two minutes of the second. Before that, Besiktas were chasing within a few points and shooting well. It was Saric's two steals and consecutive baskets that turned a tight game into a nine-point gap before the break. After the break, Mike James simply closed a door Saric had already opened.

Every star has had a silent moment before the breakthrough. My job is to listen to that silence. In this game, the silence was at the end of the second quarter, and it was short enough that if you left the screen to grab a glass of water, you missed the entire turning point.

Where Besiktas defended wrong

Go back to the possession that opens this piece. Bruno Fernando received the ball in the paint while Zizic was in exactly the right place. The problem was not Zizic. The problem was how easily the ball reached Fernando's hands.

Besiktas defended in a way that prioritised protecting the rim, yet they could not cut off the passing lane into the interior. When Efes's perimeter players delivered the ball inside, Besiktas's defence faced a choice: collapse to stop it, or hold shape to guard the arc. They chose to collapse, and Efes punished them by kicking the ball back out. When Efes kicked it out, Besiktas had to spread again, and Efes fed the ball inside once more.

That is a loop. And once a defence is caught in that loop, it no longer controls the rhythm of the game.

Based on my experience tracking games, this is the hardest type of defeat to fix in the short term, because it is not the problem of one poor individual defender. It is a problem of how an entire system distributes responsibility. To fix it, a coach must change how the whole team reacts to the ball entering the paint, not simply change personnel.

On the Efes side: a conditional win

Anadolu Efes deserved this win, but I do not think they should be complacent. Three different scoring sources across three different quarters — Fernando in the first, Saric at the end of the second, James in the third — shows this team does not depend on one individual. That is a genuine strength.

It also raises a longer-term question. When Mike James had to carry the playmaking role in the third quarter, he did it superbly. But if Efes must rely on James in that role every night, the load-management equation becomes far more complicated once the season enters its most congested stretch. The same is true of Bruno Fernando: his presence in the paint is the foundation of the entire offensive structure, and a team that builds its structure on a single anchor is carrying structural risk.

What I could be wrong about

I wrote this piece from a play-by-play description, not from possession-level data. That means some of my conclusions — particularly about how Efes controlled the paint in the first quarter — may need to be re-checked against detailed film.

Specifically, if the data showed that Besiktas actually defended the paint better than I described, and that Efes's paint points came mostly from transition situations rather than set offence, then my central argument would weaken considerably. I am keeping that door open. Humility is not a lack of confidence. It is confidence that has been tested by failure.

One more caution: the Istanbul derby always carries a psychological weight greater than a normal game. Some of Besiktas's decisions in the third quarter may have come from pressure rather than tactical error. I do not have the data to separate those two factors, and I will not pretend I do.

What will decide the next game

Besiktas leave this game with one specific question: how will they defend the paint next time? If they again choose to collapse and expose the arc, the next opponent will do exactly what Efes did. If they spread out to protect the arc, their paint will be exploited a different way.

Anadolu Efes, meanwhile, enter their next game with a more time-bound question: how long can Mike James and Bruno Fernando sustain these roles before the physical cost shows up? People who watch a game see the result. People who read a game see the process. People who understand a game see both — and they see the price attached to every different way of winning.