A career-best performance from a perennial All-EuroLeague candidate in a must-win game for his team was more than enough for Walter Tavares of Real Madrid to walk off with the MVP honor for Game 3 of the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Playoffs. Tavares dominated to the tune of 26 points, 11 rebounds, 3 assists and 3 blocks for a performance index rating of 41, the second-best ever in the playoffs since 2005, as Real Madrid stared down elimination with an 80-82 road win at Partizan Mozzart Bet Belgrade. While his PIR was a club record in the playoffs, he tied two others with his point total and 11 made two-pointers in 14 attempts.<\/p>\n
Kostas Sloukas, the buzzer-beating hero as Olympiacos Piraeus downed host Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul 71-72, followed with a PIR of 34 based on his 25 points, 6 assists and 4 rebounds. The next-best PIR of 26 belonged to Fenerbahce center Tonye Jekiri, who scored 15 points and had 7 rebounds, 3 assists and 2 steals in his team\u2019s home loss. Wade Baldwin of Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv posted a PIR of 24, collecting 16 points, 8 rebounds and 6 assists, despite a 78-83 home loss to AS Monaco. Rounding out the list of Game 3’s top performers is Mario Hezonja of Real, who collected 12 points, 14 rebounds and 3 assists for a PIR of 22.<\/p>\n
Individual highs: Mario Hezonja, Real, 14 rebounds<\/p>\n
Walter Tavares of Real Madrid was Game 3’s top scorer with a career-high tying 26 points. Sasha Vezenkov of Olympiacos Piraeus leads the EuroLeague in scoring with 17.7 points per game. Real forward Mario Hezonja led all players with a career-best 14 rebounds. Mathias Lessort of Partizan remains EuroLeague’s top rebounder with 7.2 per game. Three players had 6 assists in Game 3: Kostas Sloukas of Olympiacos, Wade Baldwin of Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv and Nick Calathes of Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul. Cazoo Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz playmaker Darius Thompson leads the league with 6.7 assists per night. Elie Okobo of AS Monaco and Jan Vesely of FC Barcelona each had 3 steals, the most in Game 3. Olympiacos guard Thomas Walkup tops the charts averaging 1.9 steals. Tavares led all players in Game 3 with 3 blocks, as he improved on his season-best 2.2 block per game. There were two double-doubles in Game 3, both by Real Madrid players, with Tavares collecting 26 points and 11 rebounds, and Hezonja 12 points and 14 rebounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A career-best performance from a perennial All-EuroLeague candidate in a must-win game for his team was more than enough for Walter Tavares of Real Madrid to walk off with the MVP honor for Game 3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":329307,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_spbk_hide_featured":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[199],"tags":[],"rumors":[],"typology":[15727],"posizionamento":[],"class_list":["post-329306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-euroleague","typology-press-release-en"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2023\/05\/unnamed.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329306"},{"taxonomy":"rumors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rumors?post=329306"},{"taxonomy":"typology","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/typology?post=329306"},{"taxonomy":"posizionamento","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posizionamento?post=329306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}