The reigning champ prevailed in Belgrade to claim a fourth straight victory
Mikael Jantunen leads Fener's long-range assault to hold off Partizan
Game Report
3 Mins read
Regular Season
Round 12 of 38
Regular Season
Partizan Mozzart Bet BelgradePAR
8799
Fenerbahce Beko IstanbulFBB
Overview
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It wasn’t as easy as initially looked likely, but ultimately Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul kept on rolling to grab a fourth straight win, downing Partizan Mozzart Bet Belgrade 87-99 in the Serbian capital on Friday night.
And outstanding three-point shooting was the key component in allowing the Turkish team to maintain its advantage from the first minute until the last.
Fenerbahce started off by stunning the passionate home crowd by with a 0-14 opening burst, threatening to turn the evening into an anti-climactic non-event.
With the Partizan missing its first nine shots, and being outrebounded 3-10 during the opening five minutes, it was clear that the visiting team had turned up ready to play. And that Partizan had not.
The beleaguered hosts finally scored their first points with Sterling Brown’s layup after nearly six minutes, but that merely reduced the deficit to 2-14, which Fenerbahce maintained to 11-24 at the end of the opening period.
The first sign of a genuine Partizan comeback came when Tyrique Jones bridged the first and second quarters with consecutive three-point plays, and then added a big dunk to reduce the deficit to single digits. But that one-man show proved to be a brief interlude as three-point strikes from Mikael Jantunen and Bonzie Colson reasserted Fenerbahce’s dominance, helping make it 39-56 at the interval.
The home team again threatened to make it a game by launching a 17-6 run at the start of the second half, before quickfire three-pointers – can you start to see a trend emerging? – from Wade Baldwin, Tarik Biberovic and Jantunen resisted the push.
The same thing happened in the fourth quarter, which started with Partizan pulling it back to 70-75 – the lowest margin since the start of the game – only for the visiting team, yet again, to pull clear with accuracy from beyond the arc as Biberovic hit another and Nicolo Melli added a couple in quick succession from the same spot.
Melli’s bang-bang made it 72-84 with seven minutes remaining, effectively ending the contest as Partizan never got closer than 12 points for the rest of the game.
Tellingly, Fenerbahce ended up with 15 three-point conversions on 29 attempts, with several of those strikes coming in key moments to repel Partizan’s attempts to recover.
The long-range leader was Jantunen, who set a new career high in scoring by pouring in 19 points on 4-of-5 three-point attempts. And the Finnish forward admitted that keeping calm enough to sink big shots in the face of Partizan’s pressure was key to the outcome.
“We’ve been slowly figuring out what we need to do to compete and win these games, and I think we kept going on that and kept doing our own thing,” he told EuroLeague TV.
“We knew it would be a game of runs. Coach talked about it a lot, that we’ve got to stay focused. I think we did a great job with that – we kept our poise and got the job done.”
Triumphant coach Sarunas Jasikevicius wasn’t in total agreement, lambasting his team for the defensive lapses which gave Partizan a route back into the game early in the second half – but also acknowledging the long-range shooting prowess which repeatedly came to the rescue.
“Everything was very cheap [for Partizan] in the first three or four minutes [after halftime], and we totally lost control of the game by giving them cheap baskets,” said the Fenerbahce boss.
“Then we contained the run with two three-point shots [from Baldwin and Biberovic], and we took control again with Nico’s two three-point shots in a row.
“But defensively we lost the control of the game completely, not being able to respond to what was obviously going to come.”
For Partizan, these are troubling times.
Fenerbahce’s 0-14 run to start extended the Serbian team’s far-too-frequent tendency to disappear for long stretches of games, and the addition of veteran playmaker Nick Calathes has done little to provide more consistency – the competition’s all-time leader in assists and steals suffered a night to forget as he contributed 0 points, 0 assists and 4 fouls committed for a PIR of minus 4.
The home fans made their feelings plain as they jeered their players into the locker rooms at halftime, and then thousands left the arena long before the final buzzer.
Partizan has now won just one of its last seven games, and it doesn’t get any easier as next week presents a daunting trip to face powerhouse Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens.
Fenerbahce, meanwhile, has found its best form of the season so far to move within one win of second place in the standings. And if Jantunen, Biberovic, Melli and co continue to shoot from long-range as they did on Friday night, the only way is up.
