Wade Baldwin's heroic effort came up short for Maccabi in Game 5

Scoring 27 points in a do-or-die Game 5 in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Playoffs would typically result in that player being on the winning side and celebrating the fact that his team has made it to the Final Four. However, for Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv's Wade Baldwin, his heroics were not enough as AS Monaco came away with a 97-86 victory.
Of course, Baldwin's main aim in Game 5 was to help Maccabi reach the Final Four for the first time since 2014, when it became EuroLeague champion for the sixth time, but he came incredibly close to achieving a personal achievement on Wednesday night.
If Baldwin had scored 3 more points, taking his tally to 30, he would have finished the season as the EuroLeague's best scorer, meaning that he'd walk away with the Alphonso Ford Top Scorer Award. Instead, that honor goes to Olympiacos Piraeus's Sasha Vezenkov, who beat Baldwin by a whisker. If you look at the stats, both have a 17.2 points per game average, but dig a little beneath the surface and you see that Vezenkov averaged 17.23 to Baldwin's 17.17.
Baldwin not only finished Game 5 as Maccabi's leading scorer, but he also had the most assists with 7, the joint most rebounds with 6 and the joint most steals with 1. He drew 8 fouls, too, more than any other Maccabi player. The Israeli side may have come up short, but Baldwin reminded everybody of his quality this year – and the EuroLeague's "best backcourt" of Baldwin and Lorenzo Brown, as the former proclaimed, will be back better and stronger next season.