By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Playing against his former team Scottie Wilbekin proved to have enough motivation on the way to 12 points to set the tone early as Fenerbahce Beko got the 86-71 win over Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv.
Marko Guduric with 23 points was the top scorer for the winning side which after a competitive first quarter, simply dominated the game.
“It feels good to be back home, to play in front of this crowd”, said Guduric. “I have to say the atmosphere was amazing. I missed this so much. And thank you to our people. It was a pleasure to play here. And a good win”.
Jonathan Motley had 15 points and Nick Calathes finished the night just missing the triple-double with 13 points, nine assists, and nine rebounds.
“The good thing about our team is we have a lot of guys”, said Calathes. “So if one man is down, another is going to step up. I don’t know our full capability, but I know we’re very talented and we have a lot of potentials to be good.”
To be exact Wilbekin and Guduric with 9 points each led the charge in the first half with Fenerbahce leading by 14 (46-32), while Calathes added seven points, six assists, and five rebounds in the same period.
The second half started with one more three by Wilbekin (49-32) and Nigel Hayes-Davis with one more three stretched the point difference to 20 (56-36) and the game was practically over.
As Fenerbahce coach Dimitris Itoudis said: “It was a well-deserved win. I think we had control for most of the game. That second quarter, when we outplayed them defensively, it’s obvious that gave us the boost of understanding how the game should be played. We did move the ball in the third quarter and got a big margin, I think, plus-20 at one point. We kind of got sloppy after that moment, but we played against a great team.”.
Maccabi managed to make it an eight-point game (70-62) at the start of the fourth quarter, but Fenerbahce’s answer was an 11-2 run (81-64).
Wade Baldwin had 14 points and Lorenzo Brown 13 with six assists for Maccabi.
For coach Oded Kattash two bad stretches of Maccabi were the key: “To win against Fenerbahce away, you have to be concentrated 40 minutes, you have to control the boards. We lost our concentration for 5 minutes in each half, and that’s something that we couldn’t come back from. It was too little, too late. But we are in the process. We are collecting good minutes, but it was tough”.