It happened: the champion fell. The Efes of a thousand lives, one of the great teams in the history of the Euroleague, will not even be in the playoff quarterfinal. The competition will have a new champion, Efes leaves with the feeling of the end of (glorious) cycle. As much as it was distrusted, that it was thought that until the last breath he was the champion and was alive, reality has been stubborn. Efes had a foot and a half out of the top eight for weeks. The other half foot, the laceit was given to him (for more ridicule) by his great Turkish rival, Fenerbahce (103-86). That he needed to win and he won. It is not mathematically in rooms, but it is close.
In the last seconds there was a threat of tangana. By then, Ergin Ataman had already left for the locker room. Efes once again paid for their defensive problems, once again they conceded too many points, their great penance in the second part of the regular season, when he tried to row against the current to recover lost ground that, this time, was excessive. The champion (16-17 with the last day to go) tightened things up after always trailing behind: 87-83 with 4:11 remaining. But then a run of 10-0 (97-83) fell in two minutes, game overwith five points from Tyler Dorsey, the player who started the season in the NBA, trying to earn a place in the Mavs.
At the last minute and with the game resolved, Itoudis, the Fenerbahçe coach, requested a review after a foul. Ataman left because he considered it disrespectful and Will Clyburn ended up facing the local bench. An ugly end to a very intense game, in which everyone worked for Fenerbahçe: 14 points from Calathes, 10 from Guduric, 11 from Motley, 17 from Dorsey, another 17 from Pierre and 26 with 4 rebounds and 4 assists from a former Barça player, Nigel Hayes Davis. From Efes Clyburn (21 points, 6 rebounds) and the usual: 13 and 6 assists from Larkin, 16 points from Micic.
Efes played the Final Four in 2019, was the leader of the Euroleague when the pandemic stopped the competition in 2020 and champion was proclaimed in 2021 against Barça and 2022 against Real Madrid. In this course I was looking for the threepeat with the arrival of players like Clyburn and Zizic, but injuries and poor form have turned the season of Ataman’s team, whose future remains up in the air, into a huge disappointment. The era of Efes, the two-time champion, ends. There will be a new king in Europe.