Six days after losing to Real Madrid in overtime at the SuperCup, Dubai played them again and won 78-77.

Dubai took 14 offensive rebounds to Real's 8 and finished with 39 rebounds to 27. They made 10 threes to 6. Real were the better shooting team on the night and still lost, because they never got a second chance at anything. Dwayne Bacon scored 24 with five rebounds and four assists. The full game page has the box.

Last week we wrote that Dubai lost the SuperCup semi-final and still made the loudest statement of the weekend. They made a louder one on Thursday.

The round in numbers

Twenty team performances, and the opening round looked exactly like an opening round.

Teams scored 83.8 points per game. Last season the twenty clubs averaged 85.9. They turned it over 12.9 times a game against 11.8 last season. More mistakes, fewer points, which is what happens when rosters that were assembled in August play a real game in September.

The shooting was normal enough: 52.9% on twos, 34.8% from three, an effective field goal percentage of 52.6. Threes made up 41.3% of all shots, almost exactly last season's rate. So the rust was in the handling, not in the shot selection.

Six of the ten home teams won. Only three games were decided by five points or fewer. The widest was Panathinaikos by 19, the closest was that one point in Dubai.

What decided each game

This is the part we care about. For every game we take both box scores, line them up, and find the biggest gap between winner and loser. Sometimes one thing explains the result. Sometimes nothing does.

Round 1 split almost evenly across four causes.

Shooting from three decided two. ASVEL made 16 of 34 from deep, 47% against Maccabi's 24%, and won by 10. Barcelona hit 12 of 29, 41% to Anadolu Efes' 20%, and beat them 89-82. Efes took only 20 threes and made four.

Free throws decided two more. Fenerbahce shot 27 free throws to Virtus Bologna's 12 in a 78-68 win, and did it while shooting 45.5% effective from the field, the worst mark of any winner in the round. Panathinaikos took 21 to Paris' 9.

Inside scoring decided two. Olympiacos shot 67% on twos at Baskonia, against 39%, in a 106-89 win. That is the highest two-point percentage of the round by a distance, and 106 points was the highest score. Zalgiris did a smaller version of it at Crvena Zvezda, 47% inside to 39%.

The offensive glass decided two. Dubai's 14 to 8 over Real Madrid, and Valencia's 12 to 5 at Besiktas, where Valencia won 96-94 in the closest game of the weekend besides Dubai's.

That leaves two. Partizan beat Milan 92-76 because Milan gave the ball away 15 times to Partizan's 9. Bayern won at Hapoel 86-84 on ball movement, 20 assists to 13.

Seven of the ten games had one clear cause. Two had a few things stacked together. One, Dubai against Real, was a coin flip that fell the right way.

What the table says

After one round the standings are mostly noise. Ten teams at 1-0, ten at 0-1, and the only thing separating them is margin: Panathinaikos +19, Olympiacos +17, Partizan +16 at the top, Paris at -19 at the bottom.

Come back in three weeks and this section will be worth reading. Right now it is a snapshot of one night. All ten results are on the Round 1 page.

The best of the round

Carlik Jones posted the highest PIR of the round, 33, with 20 points and 10 assists in Partizan's win. Dan Oturu had 32 with a 20-point, 12-rebound double-double for Hapoel, in a loss. Bacon's 31 was third.

Then Olympiacos, who did their damage in short shifts. Tyler Dorsey scored 25 in 23 minutes, Sasha Vezenkov 22 in 19. Neither of them was needed in the fourth quarter of a 17-point win.

Among the summer's new faces, the early returns were good. Dario Saric put up 17 points and a 26 PIR on his return to Efes, though Efes lost. Mike James added 22 and 5 assists in the same game. TJ Shorts scored 26 in his first night as Valencia's lead guard. Mathias Lessort had 15 and 9 in 22 minutes, and Jonas Valanciunas opened with 13 and 8 for Zalgiris.

One game is one game. No season average means anything yet, and our rate-stat tools stay quiet until the sample is worth trusting. What Round 1 gives you is a first look, not a verdict.

Next

A double week. Round 2 is played on Tuesday and Wednesday, Round 3 on Thursday and Friday. Twenty games in five days, with no time in between to fix anything.

That is where the rust either clears or becomes a problem, and it is the first real test of the deep rosters that were built this summer. By Friday night the standings will hold three games per team instead of one, and the previews go up as each round comes into view.