The 23-year-old has been on fire during the team's ongoing winning streak
Biberovic's work has paid off for Fenerbahce
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Regular Season
Round 30 of 34
Group Regular Season
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Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul grabbed its fourth consecutive victory in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague, all of them against Spanish teams, by downing FC Barcelona 88-74 in Round 30 at home on Wednesday.
It was a back-and-forth battle in which both teams showed their best face at some point in the game. Fenerbahce rolled early and built a 40-15 lead midway through the second quarter. Barcelona came back with much better intensity on defense after the break and managed to get within striking distance, 62-59, early in the fourth quarter.
With the game on the line, two players stepped up to make the difference: former Barca forward Nigel Hayes-Davis and small forward Tarik Biberovic, whose contribution to his team's winning streak has been sensational.
Hayes-Davis tallied 7 points, 3 rebounds and 3 steals in the final 7 minutes of the game, making sure that his team not only won the game, but also managed to get the head-to-head tie-break advantage against Barca. He finished the game with 12 points, 5 rebounds, 3 assists, a career-high 5 steals and 7 fouls drawn for a game-high PIR of 26.
"That was a goal coming into this game," Hayes-Davis said about the tie-breaker. "We obviously needed to win and then when we saw we had the victory, we needed to make sure we won by 8 or 9 points. So it was a good team win and huge for us in the standings. Defense was very important, Coach talked about that, that we needed to find our identity on defense. We are not always going to break EuroLeague three-point records every week."
Biberovic buried a couple of critical three-pointer in the fourth quarter to make Fenerbahce restore a double-digit game and eventually get an important win. Biberovic missed just one shot on his way to 12 points, adding 2 rebounds and an assist to amass a PIR of 10.
Coach Sarunas Jasikevicius has allowed Biberovic to find his role in the team and Biberovic has brought out his best version in the last five games. He averaged 5.4 points on 20-of-35 three-point shooting (57.1%) and a PIR of 4.3 in his first 16 games. Since then, Biberovic has averaged 12.6 points on 12-of-21 shooting from deep (57.1%) and a PIR of 11.4.
Biberovic is in his sixth season with the club and arguably in his sweetest moment with Fenerbahce. At age 23, Biberovic has a lot to say in the future and is only making Fenerbahce even stronger.