The reigning champs are rewriting the script with elite shot-quality suppression, fueling an eight-win surge in a season where margins remain razor-thin
Stats review: Fenerbahce’s defensive masterclass keeps EuroLeague tight
Statistika
3 Minutė skaityti
The mid-point of the EuroLeague Regular Season is on the horizon, but easy wins remain hard to come by as just two victories separate second and 10th place in the standings. Round 18 featured several close games, but Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul’s 1-point triumph over FC Barcelona at Ulker Sports and Event Hall was the nail-biter of the night as both teams led for stretches of the second half.
The low-scoring affair saw the hosts come out with a 72-71 victory in a defensive showcase as neither team was able to establish much of a rhythm on the offensive end. While that’s far from the norm in the EuroLeague these days, that has been the standard for Fenerbahce all season as it has climbed the standings thanks to its ability to get stops.
Ranking only 18th in offensive efficiency so far this season, no team has been more consistent on the defensive end than the reigning champions. Leading all teams by a sizeable margin, allowing only 0.94 points per possession — easily the top mark since the league’s post-pandemic offensive resurgence — Sarunas Jasikevicius’s team has made things difficult for opposing offenses.
What that means has varied among the EuroLeague's top defenses in recent history. While some teams have been disruptive, taking risks to force turnovers, others have done an especially good job defending pick-and-rolls, while still others have excelled with their shot defense. There’s a lot of variability among the latter group as, before even diving into the misses and makes, some teams do an excellent job at getting to spots early to take away shots inside, and others do a particularly good job chasing opposing shooters off the arc.
Fenerbahce’s defense this season fits an interesting mold from that perspective. Its success is built not on the good shots it takes away, but the volume of bad shots it forces. The table above lists this season’s top defenses in terms of the percentage of low-quality shots they force. Quality, in this case, is measured in Synergy Shot Quality, a metric that calculates the expected value of any given shot attempt based on a data-driven model that considers all the advanced tracking data Synergy Sports has collected on every field goal attempted in EuroLeague games over the last decade.
What makes this Fenerbahce defense so special is how often it induces low-value looks from the field and then how well it defends them. Not only does it rank second in the percentage of low-SSQ shots they face, but it also allows the fewest points per shot on those attempts in the EuroLeague. Fenerbahce forced a season-high 17 low-quality shots against Barcelona, repeatedly causing opposing players to shoot off the dribble late in the clock or to settle for two-point push shots, staying disciplined away from the ball.
As good as the offensive basketball is across the league right now, defenses at the EuroLeague level remain very complex. A great deal of nuance goes into how teams try to get stops and that has been most apparent and nothing short of critical to Fenerbahce’s recent stretch of eight wins in nine games as its title defense is back on track following a 3-5 start.