FIBA: Fenerbahçe among EuroLeague Women’s undefeated teams at the break

The EuroLeague Women regular season is currently on a brief hiatus, known casually as the “national team break.” This is, as the term suggests, a period in which European national teams reconvene and play in a qualifying tournament for another international competition, EuroBasket. Many European basketball clubs will get this time off as their top players compete for their respective national teams in the EuroBasket qualifiers.

EuroLeague Women will resume on Nov. 26, which is a bit of an awkward point, seeing as how there’s just one week remaining in the first phase of group play. Nevertheless, this break in the action gives us a good opportunity to size up the teams that are certain to advance—in particular, the three that are still undefeated with 5-0 records.

With both familiar faces and newcomers, Fenerbahçe is still the team to beat

It wouldn’t have been a very hot take to predict that Fenerbahçe would breeze through the first phase of group play, and while the Turkish giants have been challenged a couple of times thus far, their 5-0 record is not a surprise. Fenerbahçe has made five-consecutive EuroLeague Women semifinals and won two championships, and they’ve retained several of the key players that have fueled that run. Three-time EuroLeague Women MVP Emma Meesseman remains brilliant, shooting 54.8 percent from the field and averaging 2.0 steals and 1.3 blocks per game, while Kayla McBride is leading the team in scoring at 15 points per game and shooting 47.4 on 3-pointers.

It’s Fenerbahçe’s new imports, though, that have kept them atop the competition. EuroLeague Women veteran Iliana Rupert, who has participated in the competition annually since 2019, has been excellent, averaging 14.2 points and 6.4 rebounds per game and shooting 58 percent from the field. Rupert earned MVP honors for the month of October and doesn’t appear to be slowing down; the chemistry she’s established with point guard Julie Allemand is obvious (Allemand, by the way, is boasting an incredible assist-to-turnover ratio of 8.0 to 0.6), and the way Rupert has been playing makes it easy to forget that Fenerbahçe also signed Jonquel Jones for later in the season. We’ll see how that shakes out, as Fenerbahçe typically has the budget to make a big midseason addition or two, but even if that doesn’t end up happening, they should still be considered championship favorites.

Galatasaray has made a triumphant return

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Turkish club Galatasaray Çağdaş Faktoring had one of the strongest teams in all of Europe. Galatasaray won its first and only EuroLeague Women championship in 2014, defeating their bitter rivals Fenerbahçe, but had slid out of the picture since then, losing out on star imports and failing to qualify for the competition more often than not.

Only time will tell if this season’s Galatasaray team can return to the promised land, but one thing is immediately clear: This is the best they’ve looked in a decade. With a huge frontcourt that includes Elizabeth Williams, Dorka Juhász and Awak Kuier, it’s no surprise that Galatasaray leads the competition in blocks per game (4.1), and their physicality has set the tone. They may not have the high-octane scoring of Fenerbahçe, Valencia or Girona, but they’ve proven their scrappiness time and time again, with several of their wins having come down to fourth-quarter comebacks.

Even if Galatasaray doesn’t have you convinced quite yet, keep in mind that they’re expecting Marine Johannès to join the team after the national team break. Her playmaking and shooting will give Galatasaray’s offense an instant boost, and with Kamiah Smalls also on board, they’ll have a backcourt fully capable of taking over a game.

Coulibaly, Jocytė leading undefeated Girona

Of the three EuroLeague Women teams to still have undefeated records, Girona is probably the most surprising. They were ranked No. 11 out of 16 teams in FIBA’s preseason power rankings, and being grouped with annual contenders ZVVZ USK Praha and Tango Bourges Basket kept expectations for Girona tempered at best.

Needless to say, those expectations have been blown out of the water. Girona is clearly the best team in Group A, winning its games by an average of 21.6 points, and it currently ranks second in the competition in both points per game (85.2) and field goal percentage (49.1 percent). Most notably, Girona has already beaten Praha, the reigning EuroLeague Women champions, twice, showing that its early-season success is not a fluke.

What makes Girona’s first-round dominance particularly impressive is how young its roster is relative to the competition’s other top teams. Justė Jocytė has been participating in EuroLeague Women since she was in her mid-teens, but this is the first season in which she’s had a sizeable role, and she’s lived up to her billing as one of the brightest young talents in Europe, averaging 15.6 points and 4.4 assists per game and shooting 53.1 percent from the field. Then there’s Mariam Coulibaly, who is playing in her first-ever EuroLeague Women season and leading the competition in scoring at 17.8 points per game and chipping in 6.4 rebounds for good measure. She’s a tad undersized for a center at 6-foot-3, but she’s still scoring efficiently at 58.1 percent, and she seems to be the perfect fit for Girona’s uptempo style of play.

Unfortunately for Girona, they’ll probably still be thought of as underdogs in the second phase of group play, where the groups will be combined and every team will play new opponents. Can they continue to outpace expectations as their competition gets tougher?