No team will relish facing Tomislav Mijatovic’s squad at the moment
Efes has hit top gear at just the right time
Article
3 Mins read
Regular Season
Round 34 of 34
Group Regular Season
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The best teams tend to be playing their best basketball when March and April arrive, and that’s undoubtedly the case for Anadolu Efes Istanbul, which has gone 6-1 in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague since the start of March.
In fact, just 10 weeks and 10 rounds ago, as the journalist Donatas Urbonas pointed out on Thursday night, Efes was languishing in 16th place in the EuroLeague standings with a 9-15 record after a heavy defeat at Zalgiris Kaunas. That loss proved to be the end for head coach Erdem Can, with Tomislav Mijatovic, the long-time assistant coach, being promoted to the role until the end of the season.
That decision has proven to be a masterstroke by Efes’s front office as Coach Mijatovic has transformed the team, going 8-2 in the EuroLeague since taking charge and, on Thursday night, booking the club’s postseason ticket with a dominant 100-55 win in Round 34 against Crvena Zvezda Meridianbet Belgrade.
Confidence from the club
Even when Mijatovic tasted defeat for the second time in his first five games, losing 84-80 to an LDLC ASVEL Villeurbanne side that knew postseason basketball was beyond its reach, the Efes hierarchy stayed calm. Efes has responded to that setback in perfect fashion, putting together a five-game winning streak to close the regular season and enter the Play-In Showdown as one of the hottest teams in the league.
“There’s 15 or 16 of those guys [on the roster] who never stopped believing,” Coach Mijatovic commented in the post-game press conference after beating Zvezda. “I also underlined many, many times that the support we are getting from within the club – from the president to our GM to everybody that works with us – has been felt every time.
“We lost a bad game [at ASVEL]. We had a bump in the road. Nobody stopped believing, everybody kept pushing, everybody kept believing. Therefore, what these guys around us are doing makes all of our jobs that much easier. [That allows us to be] much more focused on the floor.”
One of the trademarks of Mijatovic in his 10-game tenure as Efes boss has been his positivity, be that with his players, those who work inside the club or with the fans.
“Sincere congratulations from the locker room to everybody in our organization and a special thanks to our Sinan Erdem [Sports Hall] crowd,” he noted. “Even though it’s [a public holiday for Eid al-Fitr], even though people are out of Istanbul, you saw 14,000 in Sinan Erdem [Sports Hall] again, almost full.
“This is something that Efes draws and Efes means to the people. We have a need to repay all of these guys for their belief, for their trust, for their love on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do and inshallah we’ll continue to do that.”
The heroes of recent weeks have been Shane Larkin and Will Clyburn, yet Efes’s star duo combined for just 11 points against Zvezda. It proved to not be an issue, however, as Efes got 54 points from its bench trio of Elijah Bryant, Derek Willis and Dan Oturu. That has been a common theme for the Turkish side in recent weeks, with a number of contributors stepping up to the plate on a night-by-night basis.
When asked for the key to Efes’s five-game winning run, Bryant kept it short and sweet: “I think just a next-player-up mentality and Coach having confidence in us, allowing us to play our game and everyone thriving in the system.”
It certainly seems as though Efes is playing with the shackles removed and that is breeding confidence as a result. Curiously, of the four teams Mijatovic’s Efes has faced that will be playing postseason basketball, it is a perfect 4-0.
The heart of a champion
There are still a few at Efes who tasted EuroLeague glory with Efes, either in 2021, 2022 or in both years – Mijatovic himself, as well as Larkin, Tibor Pleiss, Rodrigue Beaubois and Bryant – so this team should never be counted out.
“With the help of our tremendous fans, we need to continue to stay humble and work hard game by game to reach our second step phase, which is the first game of the play-in,” noted Efes’s 44-year-old head coach.
Well, a home game against either Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz or Virtus Segafredo Bologna awaits – and neither side will look forward to that trip to Istanbul. There’s not a team in the EuroLeague that would be happy to face Efes right now, and that’s a lot to do with the excellent work put in by Coach Mijatovic and the players over the last couple of months.
The odds are against Efes going as far as the Final Four, but stranger things have happened. One thing’s for certain: for a group that is playing with this much confidence, the sky really is the limit.