Besiktas, Carlik Jones and the Open Air 26 Test: When Preseason Becomes a Tactical Laboratory

A small screen on the kitchen counter, blue light cast on the wall at three in the morning in New York. On it, an open-air basketball court in the Balkans is hosting a friendly between Besiktas and Partizan as part of the Open Air 26 preseason tournament. No packed stands, no screaming commentators. Only the steady bounce of the ball, the squeak of rubber soles on the court, and a repeated pick-and-roll sequence that made me rewind a seventh time. A low-stakes game on a small screen, and I saw an entire universe in motion. Because in these forgettable friendlies, teams reveal the patterns they will hide the moment the real season begins. Besiktas enters the new season as Turkey's representative in the EuroLeague. This is a club with deep history across every sport, but in European basketball its standing has never matched the scale of a club with millions of supporters. Competing in the EuroLeague places a double pressure on the coaching staff: proving competitive capability in the continent's toughest arena while maintaining the commercial pull of the brand. In that context, every preseason friendly is viewed as a piece of the preparation puzzle, and the Open Air 26 tournament is one of the key stepping stones. On the other side stands Partizan, a Serbian club with a masterful development tradition and a basketball philosophy tied to rhythm, discipline, and ball movement faster than the opponent's defensive rotation. Playing Partizan in an outdoor friendly offers Besiktas a special test: facing an opponent accustomed to exploiting tactical errors rather than engaging in pure athletic contests. I have tracked many Partizan games across European competitions over the years, and what I always watch is not the scoreline but how they force opponents into choices they do not want to make. In this friendly, the two names that left the clearest mark on Partizan's side were Carlik Jones with 22 points and Lamar Stevens with 11 points. These are two entirely different profiles, and the contrast between them says much about how a European team is built ahead of a season. Carlik Jones is a lead-guard prototype carrying the scoring instincts of an American combo guard, refined across multiple basketball environments from the developmental league to European arenas. The 22 points in a preseason friendly should not be read as a manifesto but as a signal of intended role. When a lead guard crosses twenty points in a preseason game, it usually reflects not pure shooting ability but a coach granting him near-total control of the offensive tempo in every pick-and-roll situation. How Jones generated those 22 points is what interests me. In several situations he forced Partizan's defense to choose between stepping up to cut the cross-court pass or dropping back to protect the paint. Both choices carry a cost. If Partizan steps up, Jones has room to attack the rim or draw a disadvantageous switch. If Partizan drops, he has space to shoot from mid-range or find a roll to the rim behind the screen. The blind spot is not on the diagram; it lies between two movements no one measures. Lamar Stevens sits on another side of the story. With 11 points, he is not the one shaping the game through scoring, but through collisions in the middle of the floor and secondary actions that conventional statistics struggle to capture. Stevens fits the mold of a wing or versatile big who can defend multiple positions and attack without the ball. In Europe, such players are often the glue of a system, because they allow coaches to deploy schemes demanding balance between physicality and intelligence. What is notable is how these two interact. When Jones controls the ball up top, Stevens often moves to a corner or cuts into the paint exactly as the screen is set. These off-ball movements create space for Jones. If you only look at the box score, you see two numbers: 22 and 11. If you watch the film, you see a system where one player sacrifices his own space so another gains an advantage. It must be stated clearly that the original report did not provide the final score, so I will not speculate on the result. For an analyst, respecting the limits of the data matters as much as mining it. A preseason friendly is designed for experimentation, not for deciding wins and losses the way a competitive game does. Teams constantly rotate lineups, test different five-man units, and deliberately hide plays they will deploy once the season starts. Yet that experimental nature is exactly what makes these friendlies a valuable source of information. In professional basketball, teams in the preseason phase are not overly concerned with hiding how they build their roster. They test pairings, measure player reactions in specific situations, and observe how a newcomer adapts to the system. For Besiktas, the question is whether Jones can take on the primary lead-guard role in the EuroLeague, whether Stevens can contribute on both ends across a dense schedule, and whether the pieces around them are enough to form a balanced roster. In the EuroLeague, the difference between a team capable of competing and one merely surviving often lies in roster depth. The EuroLeague season is long, with constant travel between countries and crushing physical pressure. A team can have an excellent scorer, but without players like Stevens willing to do the dirty work, that star will be smothered game by game. That is why I always focus on the small details in friendlies: the big man's position when setting a screen, how a wing moves without the ball, how a team transitions from defense to offense in the first two beats. Every tactical system is born from a detail everyone saw but no one noticed. In the Besiktas-Partizan game, that detail may lie in how Besiktas handled transition defense after Partizan secured the ball. Partizan, with its characteristic basketball philosophy, tends to attack quickly after a steal. They do not wait for the defense to settle but seek to exploit the opponent's temporary disorganization. Against such a team, Besiktas must prove it can transition defensively fast, especially in identifying the right rim protector in three-on-two or two-on-one situations. Another point worth analyzing is conditioning. Preseason friendlies take place while players are still in the foundation-building phase of fitness. This means teams usually play at lower intensity than normal but use these games to measure player reactions under fatigue. For a newly assembled team, observing how players maintain tactical structure when tired is crucial. On Besiktas's side, letting Jones and Stevens score in double figures in a friendly shows the coaching staff is giving them a chance to display their primary offensive roles. But the bigger question is whether they can sustain that production against more disciplined EuroLeague defenses. This is where preseason data must be read with caution. A player scoring 22 points in a friendly does not guarantee 22 points in an official game against Europe's top defenses. When I analyze European basketball, I often remind myself that this league operates on different logic than the NBA. In the EuroLeague, the floor is exploited a little differently, zone defenses are more common, and teams tend to control tempo rather than race to score. A player like Jones, with the ability to generate points from isolation, can shine in a friendly, but he will need to learn to read more complex defenses where individual attack is no longer enough to break a system. I have spent years watching games in the EuroLeague, VTB United League, and the Spanish championship, and one of my biggest findings is that successful teams often have players who know when to slow down. In modern basketball, speed is worshipped, but speed does not mean attacking immediately. Sometimes, holding the ball at the high post, reading the defense shift, and waiting for a mistake is the most effective way to generate points. This is a skill American players often must learn when moving to Europe, and it is also Jones's biggest challenge. Stevens, with a style less dependent on the ball, will likely adapt faster to European basketball. Players who move without the ball, set screens, and defend multiple positions are always valuable in any system. But their value is often not fully reflected in the box score. That is basketball's paradox: the most important players are sometimes those with the most modest numbers. For Besiktas, the biggest challenge in the upcoming EuroLeague season will be building a clear tactical identity. Emerging teams often struggle to define their playing style. They may have talented players, but without a consistent system, they will be exploited by the big clubs. In European basketball, the system usually matters more than the individual, and the most successful teams are those that maintain structure across forty minutes. The friendly against Partizan is a small but meaningful test. Partizan is a team with tradition and discipline, and facing them helps Besiktas measure the gap between itself and Europe's top clubs. Although the result of a preseason friendly should not be overvalued, the tactical signals it reveals have long-term value. There is an aspect I rarely see fully discussed: how outdoor preseason tournaments like Open Air 26 change playing conditions. Natural light, wind, and a court not entirely identical to indoor surfaces all affect ball feel and player decisions. An outdoor game is not an ideal environment to evaluate shooting skill, but it is a fascinating environment to observe adaptability. Players who handle the ball well in adverse conditions usually have solid technical foundations. When I write about games like this, I always remember that behind every number is a person making decisions in a split second. Carlik Jones scored 22 points, but behind each point is a series of choices: shoot or pass, attack or pull back, set a screen or create space alone. I do not watch the game as a spectator; I read it as a text of deliberate errors. And in that text, every mistake has a reason. Now, to the part I want to state plainly. There is a blind spot in how we treat the preseason, and it concerns load management and commercialization. For years, I have watched European and American teams increasingly join friendlies, tours, and promotional events before the season starts. These events are presented as part of fitness preparation, but in reality they often serve commercial goals more than competitive ones. Load management is romanticized as a scientific tool to protect players, but in many cases it simply makes room for friendly tours and media events. A player may be rested in an official game for "load management" yet forced to play a promotional friendly halfway around the world. This contradiction shows that decisions about who plays and who rests are not always based on player fitness needs. For clubs like Besiktas, joining Open Air 26 may carry competitive preparation meaning, but it also carries the commercial pressure of a major brand. The coaching staff must balance testing lineups with meeting the expectations of fans and sponsors. This is a math problem any big club must face. And here is my counterintuitive angle: preseason friendlies like Besiktas-Partizan may matter more than we think, but not for the reasons we usually think. They matter not because of the result, but because they are one of the few chances to observe how a new team operates before the pressure of the official season forces it to hide its weaknesses. In an official game, teams play to win and deploy what works best. In a friendly, they test what they are unsure about. That uncertainty is where the truth hides. The biggest blind spot of preseason statistics is that we read them as forecasts when they are actually questions. Carlik Jones's 22 points are not a declaration that he will be a EuroLeague star. They are a question: can he do this when opponents play real defense? Lamar Stevens's 11 points are not a modest figure to improve. They are an answer: he can contribute without the ball, and that is what European teams need. When the EuroLeague season truly begins, Besiktas will have no room for experimentation. Every game will be a battle, every mistake punished, every point calculated. What they learned from the Partizan friendly will only have value if they know how to convert it into concrete adjustments. That is the challenge of every emerging team: turning preseason lessons into regular-season results. I will spend the coming weeks tracking how Besiktas enters the season, how Jones adapts to European tempo, and how Stevens finds his role in a system demanding patience. Defense is the last language; only those patient enough to listen to 400 straight games can interpret it. And sometimes, in an outdoor friendly in the Balkans, amid the steady bounce of the ball on the court at three in the morning, we happen to hear answers the season will verify. The variable for the next game is not how many points Jones scores. It is whether Besiktas can hold its structure when the pace rises and the space narrows.