Besiktas vs Partizan at Open Air 26: Carlik Jones' 22 Points and the Real Test of a EuroLeague Team

Third quarter, four minutes and twelve seconds left on the clock. Carlik Jones takes the ball on the right wing, calls for no screen, tilts his shoulder and cuts inside. I am sitting in front of the screen with a notebook whose spine has long gone soft, the same one that has travelled with me through eighteen NBA Finals and twenty-seven years of sitting in arenas from Los Angeles to Istanbul. Besiktas against Partizan at Open Air 26 is a friendly. No trophy hangs on it. Yet that possession made me sit up straight, because it told a story the box score never tells.

Jones finished with 22 points. Lamar Stevens added 11. Partizan had two names above double digits. Besiktas, the club that will represent Turkey in the EuroLeague next season, kept turning the wheels of its preparation, and this game belonged to the run of friendlies the coaching staff uses for experimentation.

One friendly, two different purposes

Besiktas enters the new season with a EuroLeague spot. For a Turkish club, that spot means a schedule half again as dense as a normal season, flights between Istanbul and Madrid, Athens, Belgrade and Tel Aviv inside four days, and squad depth becoming an obligatory luxury. The Besiktas staff does not need to win a September friendly. It needs to know which player survives the thirty-second minute of a EuroLeague game in January.

Partizan sits in a different state. The Serbian club still keeps its own texture: a young collective led by scorers capable of creating something out of nothing. Jones is that kind of player. A guard who manufactures his own shot, the man the ball still finds when the offensive system collapses.

In the first half, Besiktas ran a matchup defence shaded toward the passing lanes. Partizan answered with constant side-to-side reversals. It was a drill, not a battle. But the drills two teams choose say a great deal about what they fear most in the season ahead.

Besiktas entered this friendly run with a backcourt built to endure. It needs at least two ball handlers good enough to alternate across eighty games, because the EuroLeague does not allow one player to carry both scoring and organisation for the whole road. Against Partizan the staff kept rotating who initiated the offence, even testing a reserve guard leading the second unit. It is a small detail, and it decides whether a club survives December.

Reading the game through pace, not points

Based on my experience tracking games, a preseason friendly is only trustworthy in three places: the pace of the defensive unit, how the ball is distributed in the first eight seconds of each possession, and which player the coach pulls and when.

Jones's twenty-two points fall outside those three. What matters more is how he scored them. After halftime Besiktas switched to guarding him with a taller, longer-armed defender, conceding one dribble of penetration before collapsing with the centre. That is the standard EuroLeague answer to small scoring guards: do not chase the first shot, suffocate the second.

Jones read it. He began releasing the ball earlier, drawing two defenders and kicking out to Stevens in the corner. Stevens scored 11, most of them from exactly those situations, when the defence had already turned and nobody could close out in time. The box score calls that scoring. I call it the trail of a defensive system auditing itself. Besiktas tested a coverage, Partizan found the escape, and both walked off with a page of notes.

Something similar once happened to me at a World Athletics Championships in London. When I misread an athlete's name in front of millions, I could not fix anything in that instant. I could only sit down afterwards, rewind the tape, and take notes. A team is no different. A friendly is the tape. It does not judge; it only shows where the gaps are.

European basketball is changing tempo

There is something I have watched in the EuroLeague over recent seasons, and this game confirmed it. Elite European basketball is becoming a track meet. Mid-tier clubs no longer set up half-court chess, waiting, calling plays. They run. They reverse the ball constantly, force the defence to work off balance, and shrink a possession from twenty seconds to twelve.

That style rewards conditioning more than thinking. A rotation with eight players who can run thirty-five minutes each will beat a rotation with five better players who can only run twenty-five. Besiktas understands this, and that is why the Partizan game has value. It is a fitness test disguised as a basketball game.

Alongside that, EuroLeague rule adjustments work like invisible patches. Each season, how referees call blocking fouls, how they interpret travelling, how they handle contact under the rim all shift slightly. Those changes never appear on the scoreboard, yet they reshape the value of each player archetype. A guard who lives on drawing fouls can lose half his output over a line of wording in the rulebook. It is the most underrated factor when people evaluate a team.

I once sat in a war room in Belgium during the spectator-free 2026 season, spending six hours reviewing one thousand two hundred touches by a nineteen-year-old player. People asked why I would spend that long on a game with no crowd. The stadium was empty, but tactics have never spoken more clearly. No roar, no stands pressure, only structure left. A friendly is the same.

The contrarian angle: the most suspicious thing is the scoring

Jones's scoring line is the easiest thing to misread. Looking at 22 points, fans will say Partizan has a star. But in preseason, the top scorer is usually the player allowed to try the most. Coaches let him take shots he will not be permitted in the real season. Partizan tested how much load Jones can carry when the system breaks. Besiktas tested how long its defence holds against such a player. Both sides won, and neither has won anything.

Partizan carries less of that pressure. For them, preseason is a chance for young players to prove they deserve minutes in the ABA League, where every road game is a genuine physical fight. When Jones scores 22 in a friendly, he is not only scoring for himself. He is showing the staff that on nights the team cannot find rhythm, there is still someone to hold the ball and create.

At the same time, the road for a club like Partizan is being squeezed by the very commercial forces that feed it. Jerseys covered in global sponsor logos, schedules designed for television, tickets sold to international audiences. The loyal fans in Belgrade still come, still sing, still keep a soul in the building. But the money flows elsewhere, toward markets where nobody knows their songs. Every European club lives with this, from Partizan to Besiktas.

A lopsided friendly can create the illusion of progress. Fans read the report, see a win, see a newcomer score, and believe everything is on track. Three weeks later, when the season starts, real defence arrives, and the gaps hidden in September become holes in October.

What to watch next

Besiktas will play more friendlies before the season tips off. Watch three things: how many players they use in the fourth quarter, how often they turn the ball over in the first eight seconds of a possession, and whether small scoring guards like Jones get switched onto a taller defender from the opening quarter.

Those three markers never show up on the scoreboard. They live in the coaching staff's notebook, and usually only surface once a third of the season has passed.

A good broadcaster is not the person with the answers, but the person who knows where the story is going. For Besiktas, that story starts in friendlies nobody remembers the score of. For Partizan, it starts in the possessions where a guard has to save his own system.

That derby night, I lost my voice in the noise, and found myself in the silence. The same applies here. No loud crowd, no tense scoreboard, only the sound of the ball bouncing, rubber soles scraping the floor, and a EuroLeague team learning how to stand firm before the season calls its name.