Panathinaikos secured their first win in this season’s Euroleague by bringing Pinar Karisyaka Izmir back down to earth with an 85-73 success in Athens.
Both teams now own 1-1 records in Group C.
James Gist led all scorers with 27 points as he was on the end of many highlight alley-oops and all-round solid execution.
“Tonight everything went good for us, but this is not our limit,” Gist said afterwards. “We have a very good team and I think that every day we will be better.
“We took an early lead and although Karsiyaka is a good and athletic team, we had the solutions needed to beat them. We proved our character after the loss to Lokomotiv Kuban and this is a good sign of how we must handle the situations during the season.”
Kenny Gabriel paced the Turkish side with 17 points.
In Group A and two losing teams from round one managed to get on the board this week as Bayern Munich grabbed a comfortable 69-60 win at home to BC Khimki.
Nihad Djedovic started strongly scoring nine of Bayern’s first 11 points and by the final buzzer; the Bosnian had amassed 17 points to lead the Germans to victory.
Alexey Shved led Khimki with 16.
The other losing side from last week, Real Madrid put on a clinical display to defeat Crvena Zvezda 98-71 in the Spanish capital.
The reigning champions were in no mood to drop to 0-2 as they raced out to a 22-6 first quarter lead, holding the Serbs to a single bucket in the opening nine minutes and from there, were never really challenged.
Jaycee Carroll led the way with 19 points for Real as coach Pablo Laso was allowed to rotate his bench and play youngsters Luka Doncic and Dino Radoncic, with both adding to the scorers column.
Maik Zirbes had 15 for Crvena Zvezda.
Unicaja Malaga have gone 2-0 in Group D after beating Maccabi FOX Tel Aviv 93-82 in Israel as the 2014 Euroleague champions are yet to trouble the win column.
Trailing throughout, Maccabi seemed to have momentum late on when they narrowed the deficit to 82-80, but Unicaja, inspired by a sublime Mindaugas Kuzminskas went on a 9-0 run to seal the win.
Kuzminskas had a career-high 23 points in the win for Malaga.
Limoges hit 12 three-pointers as they got their first win of the Euroleague season as they got the better of Cedevita 84-80 in the Croatian capital.
Leo Westermann and Nobel Boungou-Colo each got 15 points to spoil Jacob Pullen’s game-high 21 for Cedevita.
“It wasn’t an easy game, but we did what we had to do,” Boungou-Colo said. “We missed some chances to take the control of the game, but we didn’t give up and managed to get a win. The important thing is we didn’t panic. We were aggressive and stayed in the game until the end.”
Anadolu Efes went to 2-0 in Group B as they saw-off the challenge of EA7 Milano 89-73 in Istanbul.
Jon Diebler paced the winners with 17 points. Thomas Heurtel added 13 and 8 assists as well for Anadolu Efes.
