Hello, Turkish Airlines Euroleague fans all over the world!

We are almost halfway finished with Top 16 stage of this great Euroleague season and, speaking for those of us at Efes Pilsen, I can say that our most important game is the next one. That comes this Thursday on the road against Real Madrid, which has the same 2-0 record as we do in Group G, making ours the only group with undefeated co-leaders. That also makes this the only group where one team is guaranteed to be 3-0 going in the half-time break in this round.

Coming to this showdown, we have been practicing hard on our game for a while and we received the results of this hard work with those two Top 16 victories so far, against Montepaschi Siena and Partizan Belgrade. In my opinion, our first win against Siena at home was absolutely crucial for the remainder of the season. We had to win that if we were going to have leverage moving ahead in the round. It was a game of defensive runs and we survived the battle, winning by just 2 points, although Siena had a chance to win it on the last shot. Survived is a good word for it, but the win is what was most important, and we got it.

Our second Top 16 game against Partizan at Belgrade Arena last week was definitely an exciting one, too. Having seen the record-breaking attendance recorded at that arena in the past, I was wondering how the crowd would behave - especially after remembering the Turkey-Serbia match-up in the semifinals of the World Championships last fall, a victory we took from their national team in the very last seconds, on a layup by one of my Efes Pilsen teammates, Kerem Tunceri. I would like to tip my hat right now to the Partizan fans, who showed... more

Hello to all Euroleague fans around the globe,

I am very excited to join the great players who share their views and thoughts through Euroleague.net. This being my first post, I would like to share some of my personal background with you. You could almost say I was born on the basketball court; with both my parents being former basketball players, it would not be surprising if it had happened so. My mother played basketball in her youth, but it was my father, Necati Guler, one of my biggest idols, who pulled my brother Muratcan and me like a magnet to the basketball court. He is still considered one of the greatest point guards of Turkish basketball history. He played along Turkish legends like Cholet coach Erman Kunter and against great European players like Panagiotis Giannakis. My brother is the player and the person I still look up to as an example. He is one of the most athletic players and unselfish shooting guards that I know of and he has led his current team, Antalya BSB, to the sixth position in the Turkish League with eight wins so far this season.

Being around a basketball since birth, I cannot say when I started playing, but I knew basketball was my life when I started to grow up. That's one of the reasons behind my decision to go to United States, to get an education and to play college basketball. I spend two years in Salt Lake Community College in Utah and then transferred to Carroll College of Helena, Montana, where we played the NAIA Final Four in my junior year with the greatest group of people I have been around. After graduation, I returned to play professional basketball at Darrusafaka in Turkey with one goal in mind: to become part of a Euroleague team. A year after,... more