Besiktas vs Partizan at Open Air 26: Carlik Jones Scores 22 and the Reckoning Facing a EuroLeague Newcomer

In the second half of the preseason friendly at the Open Air 26 tournament, Carlik Jones received the ball at the top of the arc, called for a screen and turned right. The Besiktas defender trailed him by exactly half a step. Jones stopped, released the ball at chest height and pulled up from mid-range. It went in. That was point number eighteen of the twenty-two he scored on the night. I rewatched that clip three times, and the reason had nothing to do with the beauty of the move. Partizan used Jones in a September friendly with a clarity that is almost disconcerting: he was the last man with the ball in virtually every half-court possession, and the four teammates around him moved on patterns that had clearly been drilled. A Serbian club arriving in September with a settled offence is normal. A Serbian club doing it with an American newcomer as its conductor is worth writing down. On the other side of the floor, Besiktas are in the final stretch of assembling a roster. The Turkish club will compete in the 2026-26 EuroLeague as one of three representatives of Turkish basketball, alongside Fenerbahce and Anadolu Efes. Lamar Stevens scored 11 points for Partizan in the same game. A professional note before going deeper. The original report highlighted two individual figures for Partizan and did not publish Besiktas's scoring breakdown. I say that up front because the worst habit in transfer journalism is filling a data gap with a story that merely sounds complete. The 2026-26 EuroLeague runs with 20 teams, each playing 38 round-robin games before the play-in and playoffs. That calendar dictates almost everything about how clubs build. It turns depth from an advantage into a survival condition. A team with eight quality players can win three straight games in the EuroCup, but it will break in January, when two games a week stretch from Istanbul to Belgrade and from Madrid to Kaunas. Besiktas return to Europe's top competition after a long absence. According to EuroLeague records, their last appearance in the main phase was the 2026-13 season, when the roster was built around names tied to a brief cycle of success in Turkish basketball. Between those two markers lie more than a decade of EuroCup promotions and relegations, financial restructurings and an increasingly stratified domestic landscape. Turkish basketball now has three EuroLeague representatives, and the gap between them is wider than sharing a passport suggests. Fenerbahce and Anadolu Efes sit among the highest-budget clubs in Europe, with academies, infrastructure and sponsorship deals built over years. Besiktas enter the same competition with a significantly lower wage bill and a constraint familiar to every Turkish club: a depreciating local currency makes every euro-denominated contract more expensive by the month. That is why friendlies like the one against Partizan cannot be read as ordinary wins or losses. For a club newly promoted to the top tier, every preseason quarter is a test of whether the framework drawn on paper can withstand physical pressure. For Partizan the context is inverted. The Belgrade club sits under Zeljko Obradovic, who restored them to the status of a European power and turned their arena into one of the most hostile destinations in the EuroLeague. Under Obradovic, September friendlies are not exhibitions. They are discipline checks, where a player substituted for losing his defensive assignment matters more than a player scoring 20. The Open Air 26 format placed both teams in an unusual setting: an outdoor court, artificial light, humid air and noise that no arena roof absorbs. Preseason tournaments of this kind have become a popular marketing product in Europe, especially in countries where basketball competes directly with football in late summer. They give clubs an evening of brand exposure, fans a chance to see the team up close, and coaching staffs a test no practice plan can simulate. That is where the interest lies. An outdoor game produces dirty data: three-point percentages distorted by wind, turnovers inflated by a slick floor, physical metrics skewed by temperature. But the atmosphere is real. And for a team about to embark on 19 road trips, communication under noise is a far more valuable skill than a made three. Back to Carlik Jones. He is not an unknown quantity to anyone following North American basketball: he was the 2026-23 G League Most Valuable Player with the Windy City Bulls, spent time with the Chicago Bulls and Denver Nuggets, and broke through internationally with South Sudan at the 2026 FIBA World Cup and the Paris 2026 Olympics. What makes Jones worth analysing is not the honours list. He stands roughly 1.83 metres, below the average EuroLeague scoring guard, and does not possess NBA-level explosive speed. What he has instead are three qualities European coaches prize: the ability to change pace in tight spaces, a reliable mid-range shot when the shot clock drops under eight seconds, and the patience not to shoot before an advantage exists. Against Besiktas, his 22 points carried the fingerprints of that archetype. Most came from wing pick-and-rolls where he forced the defence to choose between switching and leaving his defender stuck behind the screen. He did not shoot much from beyond the arc; he attacked the space between the three-point line and the paint, the area European defences habitually concede by dropping deep. How Besiktas defended those actions showed a team still experimenting. Head coach Dusan Alimpijevic is known for aggressive schemes, pressuring the ball handler and switching across positions. In the first half Besiktas switched almost every screen, forcing Jones to attack bigger defenders. In the second half they dropped back and went under screens. Jones scored in both scenarios, but in entirely different ways. That is the kind of information a friendly report does not record. It is also exactly the kind transfer work requires, because it answers a far more specific question than who won: can an undersized scoring guard survive in the EuroLeague once opponents have prepared properly? Lamar Stevens is the inverse story. A forward around 1.98 metres who has played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Boston Celtics and Memphis Grizzlies, he was brought to Belgrade to do things that never appear in a box score. He guards opposing forwards, contests rebounds at both ends and cuts off the ball to create space for ball handlers. Eleven points in a friendly says little about his value, and I will return to that point. For Besiktas, the bigger issue is roster architecture. A club newly promoted to the EuroLeague generally builds in one of two directions. The first is to sign one or two proven European scorers, build the system around them and hope they can manufacture 25 points a night. The second is to construct a balanced roster where nobody averages more than 13, but eight players meet the defensive standard and can absorb different assignments depending on the opponent. Based on my experience following games and preseason camps over many years, the second approach always looks unconvincing in September and always looks wiser in February. The problem is that in Istanbul, pressure from the stands does not allow a club to be patient for long. Besiktas supporters, with the famously fervent and equally critical Carsi group, will demand results from the opening rounds. It is a familiar paradox for clubs stepping up: they need time to build, yet the very presence in that competition takes time away from them. There is one detail about roster building I want to dwell on. EuroLeague deals are usually closed in silence, and the reason is not always commercial secrecy. Some transfers stay quiet because consensus is fragile, and I know that from listening to fans before calling sources. Once a supporter base latches onto a name and starts applying public pressure, a front office loses the ability to walk away quietly, and agents understand this perfectly. The price of the deal rises instantly. For a club like Besiktas, keeping negotiations confidential until everything is signed is not the arrogance of a communications department. It is part of the financial strategy. This is where the blind spot in the orthodox narrative appears. The most common story told about preseason friendlies is that they mean nothing, that results do not matter, that everything is an experiment. That is partly true, and precisely for that reason it becomes an excuse to read nothing at all from these games. The reality is more complicated. For an established club like Partizan, friendly results genuinely are meaningless. But for a club entering the EuroLeague for the first time, a friendly does not measure basketball quality; it measures organisational readiness. It shows whether the staff has decided who handles the ball in the fourth quarter, whether bench players understand their roles, whether the medical department can handle 38 rounds. It is also worth stating plainly that Jones's 22 points should not be read as prophecy. Scoring in an outdoor friendly, against a defence trying two different schemes in the same evening, is a very weak indicator. What deserves attention is not the total but how Partizan organised space around him: cutters timed correctly, screens placed to force Besiktas into decisions, and not a single possession where Jones had to shoot off balance because teammates stood still. The same applies to Lamar Stevens. Reading only the 11 points would mean ignoring every reason Partizan signed him. The value of a defensive forward lies in what never reaches the scoresheet: how often he forces an opponent to change the direction of an attack, how often he contests a rebound from a disadvantageous position and still secures the ball, how often he runs the length of the floor to break up a transition. No league publishes those numbers in preseason, which is exactly why they matter. I was once burned by a single source, and from that I learned to burn fake news back with three rounds of verification. In this case, those three rounds mean separating three kinds of information: information about the result, information about the process, and information about people. The original report supplies the first and part of the second. The third, as always, must be found on your own. People remember me for a mispronunciation, but I stayed because of the corrections I made in the right places. In this trade, spelling the name of a South Sudanese guard or a Serbian coach correctly sounds trivial. It is the first test of how seriously a writer takes the job. If I will not spend three minutes checking how Carlik Jones is spelled, readers are entitled to doubt whether I would spend three hours checking a release clause. Zoom out. The Besiktas-Partizan friendly at Open Air 26 is one node in a much larger web: the contest between club models in Europe. On one side stands Partizan, built on culture and local identity, where supporters treat the club as part of the city and a legendary coach can sustain influence across generations of players. On the other stands Besiktas, a multi-sport club with an enormous fanbase but limited basketball resources, trying to survive in a competition where the minimum cost of competing keeps rising. This is the story of nearly all European basketball, told through different names. The 2026-26 season will answer one specific question: can a mid-budget club, led by a coach strong on defensive organisation, survive in the EuroLeague under the most punishing calendar in the competition's history? Besiktas do not need to win the title. They need to prove their presence here is not a one-off appearance. For Partizan the question is different. They need to turn an undersized scoring guard into the pace-setter for a team with playoff ambitions. Jones has shown he understands how to do that in a game that does not count. The real pressure arrives in December, when the two-game weeks begin grinding down legs and every defence in Europe has three months of film on him. What to watch in the coming weeks is fairly clear. For Besiktas, it is the two remaining friendlies and the final roster: whether they add a stretch forward to open the floor, and whether they keep a quality backup at guard. For Partizan, it is how Obradovic distributes minutes between Jones and the other guards once the season starts, because a team overly dependent on one ball handler runs into trouble the moment he is injured or in foul trouble. And there is one more thing I always look for before judging a deal: how the community reacts. Under reports about this friendly, Besiktas fans in Istanbul are debating whether the squad has enough depth for 38 rounds, while Partizan fans in Belgrade are pleased with how Jones runs the offence. Two fanbases watched the same game and saw different teams. That does not mean one side is wrong. It means the game contained more stories than a box score can tell. What I carry away from the Open Air 26 evening is not a prediction about where Besiktas or Partizan will finish. It is an observation about how European basketball works at its deepest level: teams do not win with what they display in September, but with what they can hold onto until April. The question for Besiktas is not whether they can score 80 points against a Serbian club on a summer evening. The question is whether, in January, when the team must fly from Istanbul to Munich within 48 hours and still hold its defensive structure, they will have enough bodies and enough organisation to do it.