As the 2025 Turkish Basketball Super League Finals begins, the Euroleague Champions played a decent game at Ulker Sports Arena in Istanbul and took over the series 1-0 against Besiktas Fibabanka.
Fenerbahce Beko led almost the whole game and didn’t let Besiktas Fibabanka to come back. Despite Tarik Biberovic’s absence, reigning champions had great contributions from a lot of players. 14 minutes were enough for Khem Birch to reach double digit points (15 points) after a long time, with 6 rebounds. Wade Baldwin helped his team with 14 points and 5 assists, while Metecan Birsen proves that he can overtake Biberovic’s role by contributing with 13 points and 6 rebounds. Both Marko Guduric and Nigel Hayes Davis had 7 points tonight. On the other side, Besiktas Fibabanka had 3 players to reach double digit points, but it wasn’t enough for the win.
On tonight’s game, Besiktas head coach Dusan Alimpijevic was ejected by the referee Yener Yılmaz. Besiktas made a statement about the incident:
“Tonight, the Ulker Sports Arena hosted scandals that will go down in Turkish basketball history as a black stain.
Yener Yılmaz, who does not hesitate to show his hostile feelings towards our club at every opportunity with his decisions that are far from justice, proved once again that he is a disgrace to the Basketball Referee Community by unfairly ejecting our Head Coach Dusan Alimpijevic, who exercised his right to challenge three times in the first half of the first game of the final series against Fenerbahce Beko and was right in all three of them, by staging the game he had designed in his mind beforehand.
Immediately after his infamous decision, the same Yener Yılmaz threatened our Head Coach Dusan Alimpijevic to end the game without his authorization if he did not leave the court immediately.
We call on the Turkish Basketball Federation to take action to keep this person off the court.“
Game 2 is set for June 19, 2025, will be in the same arena. Fenerbahce Beko would like to keep things easier and have a night like this, but Besiktas Fibabanka surely will push to tie series and take the home court advantage.
Posted on: 17 Jun 2025, 23.57 CET
