MIES (Switzerland) - Manisa Basket reached the Round of 16 in last season's FIBA Europe Cup with a host of familiar names like Emanuel Terry, John Roberson, Pako Cruz, and head coach Hakan Demir at the wheel. This season, the club has joined the BCL with a revamped logo and new colors, and an entirely new roster.
A short scroll down the list of players recruited by the club in the summer will tell you that Saben Lee, Javon Freeman-Liberty, and Jamorko Pickett are all playing their rookie seasons in Europe.
However, it should also be noted that all have recent NBA Regular Season experience. Martynas Echodas and Hugo Besson, at 27 and 23 years of age respectively, are playing the role of veteran European imports and even Fabian White Jr, as the final addition, has only played one season on this continent, with Boulogne-Levallois.
The fresh look to the club and roster is reflected on the style of basketball that new head coach Ertug Tuzcukaya put on the floor in Murcia for BCL Gameday 1.
Manisa Basket couldn't have had a much tougher first game. Taking on last season's Final Four participants UCAM Murcia, in Spain, they approached the challenge like a street fighter taking on a professional boxer and landed haymaker after haymaker on one of Liga Endesa's slickest teams. There is an untucked-shirt swagger to the way this Manisa Basket team plays.
They made no attempt to disguise the style of basketball they want to enforce on games either, as our first clip demonstrates.
Right from the opening tip, instead of setting the offense and running through options in search of the best look at the basket, Saben Lee used a logo pick-and-roll to force a switch, dribbled his way to the wing, took one look at the Murcia big man guarding him and hit a sweet crossover combo into a sidestep, three-ball.
This was intended to be a punch in the mouth and Lee never stopped swinging from then on. He finished with a game-high 36 points on a stupendous 71.4 percent shooting clip overall. An effort that saw him make our first Team of the Week.
Everyone knows that Spanish clubs love to control the pace of games and use their depth and talent to find the best tactical advantages possible, but Manisa don't look like a team that will allow anything to be dictated to them this season.
Instead, they forced a tempo on the game that saw both teams end with 85 possessions each and the Turkish newcomers score at a ruthless rate of 122 points per 100 possessions.
It's not just about the likes of Lee, Freeman-Liberty, or Yunus Sonsirma pushing the pace either, just watch the way that big men Echodas and Pickett bolt out of the traps as soon as the rebound or steal is secured.
They ran like this relentlessly for all four quarters, and in overtime. Manisa scored 27 points from turnovers, with Freeman-Liberty and White Jr coming up with 3 steals a piece but it was the way they ran at every opportunity that truly unsettled Murcia.
Also worth noting in that second clip is the quickness of Jamorko Pickett's hands to knock the ball away. Both Pickett and Echodas stand at 2.06m (6ft 9in) and will regularly be undersized this season, so it's clearly by design that they want to push the game toward a track meet and look to use their foot and hand speed to disrupt bigger opponents on the defensive end.
Whilst they may not have the deepest roster - Ertug Tuzcukaya ran a rotation with only seven players seeing more than 10 minutes of play - Manisa don't let up or soften the blows when they go into their bench.
French guard Hugo Besson is what can only be described as a razzle-dazzle player and he came off the bench to score 16 points, putting the whole league on notice that we have a new candidate for the BCL's best sixth man.
One of the benefits of pushing the tempo at all times is the opportunity to get mismatches in early offense situations.
In the clip above, the moment Besson noticed he had a Murcia big man guarding him, he was straight into his bag. No ball screen needed, just sauce, raw sauce (yes, that is a Man's Not Hot reference, deal with it).
Talking of early offense, Manisa-ball doesn't get any less relentless if teams manage to slow the initial break. Murcia and Sito Alonso would have loved to draw the game into a more half-court affair but Lee wasn't having a bar of it.
Check out the clips below of him using drag screens in semi-transition.
If we didn't receive the message about who he is after the crossover and stepback from the opening tip, that rejected ball screen and two-handed flush left us with no doubts whatsoever about who Saben Lee is planning to be this season.
That's not to say it's all run-and-gun or letting the talent win for Manisa and Ertug Tuzcukaya.
They were also excellent at executing out of timeouts every time they needed to reverse a Murcia run. On at least three occasions, Tuzcakaya sent his team out from the huddle and watched them execute the play perfectly.
This play above is notable for its creativity, as much as its sound logic. If you know you likely have a size mismatch up front that also means you have a speed advantage, why not set a big-to-big or 45 ball screen on the logo, then watch your opponent's 7-footer try and stay in front of your power forward on the switch. Moussa Diagne won't be the last center to have a tough time staying in front of Pickett this season.
Now, it's not to say that it was all plain sailing for Manisa. They turned the ball over 20 times and only got 18 bench points to Murcia's 35.
When you play fast like this, turnovers will be a feature of your play that you need to keep a lid on and it's one thing to ride a short rotation to a huge win over a Spanish team in October, but it's a different thing altogether to do it with the same short rotation next spring when we reach the decisive part of the season.
Let's not take anything away from Manisa, though. This was an excellent start to life in this league and they have shown everyone that they are here to compete and they are also here to do it their way.
Even when Murcia took a 10-point lead at the midpoint of the fourth quarter, they still trusted themselves and the way they want to play to drag themselves back into the game.
As an example of that, we will leave you with this fadeaway from Freeman-Liberty with less than a minute to play. He finished the game with 22 points, almost all of them coming in the fourth quarter and OT.