Frutti Extra Bursaspor guard Derek Needham, in his third 7DAYS EuroCup season with as many different teams, is currently playing better and more consistently than he ever has before in the competition.
Who's hot: Derek Needham, Frutti Extra Bursaspor
Stats
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Needham is averaging career-high 12.9 points based on 48.5% three-point shooting and 50.9% two-point shooting, both his personal highs. He ranks second among all EuroCup players with 1.8 steals per game, another career best. He ranks ninth in assists, with 4.9 per game, while posting an average PIR of 13.4, yet another personal high for him.
Most of those better numbers are owing to Needham's improvement in the latter stages of the current regular season.
In the first eight games of this campaign, Needham scored in double figures just three times, albeit each of those times netting between 18 and 20 points while hitting at least 4 three-point shots per game.
Needham dished 5.1 assists, had 2.1 steals, and shot a very good 43.2% from long range in those games, but also had three games without any three-pointers made.
Since those up-and-down performances, however, Needham has been one of the most prolific scorers in all of EuroCup.
Needham has scored at least 14 points in each of his last five games. He finished three of them with 17 points and bagged a season-high 26 in a Round 12 road loss against Cedevita Olimpija Ljubljana.
Needham nearly doubled his scoring average before those last five games, posting 18.2 points on average but also improving his three-point accuracy to an impressive 55.2%.
The Bursaspor guard also significantly improved his two-point accuracy and his contribution in rebounds while more than doubling his average PIR to 19.6 from 9.5 before Round 9.
Still, the greatest part of his PIR jump comes from Needham's scoring, which he has done better than any EuroCup player in the last two months.
No player with more than four games played since Round 9 has averaged more than Needham's 18.2 points. And just seven players have scored more total points during that stretch, although each of them has played one game more than Needham.
This week, Needham and Bursaspor face visiting Mincidelice JL Bourg en Bresse. The first time they met, in Round 6, Needham played his worst game of the season, being held to 2 points and 4 assists for a PIR of 3. He will be poised for the first game of Round 15 on Tuesday to flip that narrative and continue his hot streak in a must-win game for his team.