Real Madrid have played three games this season and lost all three. They lost in Dubai by one. They lost in Istanbul to Anadolu Efes by ten, giving the ball away twenty times. Then they went to Hapoel Tel Aviv and lost 102-98 in the best game of the week. Theo Maledon scored 26 with seven assists and produced a performance index rating of 40, one of the two best individual nights of the round. His team still lost.

Three weeks ago they won the SuperCup. They are now last but one in the table.

The two rounds in numbers

Twenty games in five days, and the opening-night rust is gone.

In Round 1 teams scored 83.8 points a game and shot 52.9% on two-pointers. Across these two rounds they scored 87.7 and shot 56.3% inside. Turnovers fell from 12.9 a game to 12.0, assists rose from 18.1 to 19.6.

Three-point shooting did not move at all: 34.8% in Round 1, 34.6% since. So the improvement came from the easy stuff. Teams are finding the rim again, holding onto the ball, and making the extra pass, which is what a week of basketball does to legs that spent August in a gym.

The scoreboard noticed. Valencia put up 111 against Baskonia and 105 at ASVEL. Besiktas won 109-93 at Maccabi for their first win of the season. Fenerbahce beat Bayern 100-76. Eight of the twenty games were decided by five points or fewer, and thirteen of the home teams won.

What decided the games

We take both box scores from every game, line them up, and find the biggest gap between winner and loser. Across these two rounds no single cause dominated, but the pattern changed between them.

Round 2 was the free-throw round. Three games turned on it. Dubai shot 25 free throws to Barcelona's 6 and won by seven. Olympiacos took 22 to Zalgiris' 5 and won by two in Kaunas. Valencia took 20 to Baskonia's 10 on the way to 111 points. Three more games turned on turnovers, three on three-point shooting.

Round 3 was the turnover round. Anadolu Efes gave it away seventeen times and lost at Crvena Zvezda. Bayern gave it away seventeen and lost to Partizan by two. Dubai gave it away thirteen to Fenerbahce's seven and lost by ten.

Two results are worth pulling out. Virtus Bologna beat Olympiacos 96-94 by owning the offensive glass, 17 offensive rebounds to 10, which is how a team that shoots worse than you still wins. And Hapoel against Real Madrid was the rarest kind of game: even almost everywhere, decided only at the margins, four points at the end of forty minutes where nothing separated them.

Across the twenty games, twelve had one clear cause, six had a few things stacked together, and two were coin flips. Turnovers were the single biggest factor of the week, deciding six games, with three-point shooting behind on five and free throws on four.

The rest of the week

Panathinaikos went through it without being tested: 102-79 against ASVEL, then 90-67 against Maccabi, both by shooting the other team off the floor from three. Partizan did the same job quietly, 92-79 at Paris and 86-84 at Bayern, and are 3-0 without anybody talking about them.

Anadolu Efes had the strangest week. They beat Real Madrid 94-84 at home, forcing twenty turnovers, then went to Belgrade and lost 77-72 to Crvena Zvezda by committing seventeen of their own. A team with that much new talent will take a while to settle, and this is what that looks like from the outside.

Olympiacos won in Kaunas by two and then lost in Bologna by two, beaten on the offensive glass by a Virtus side that had lost its opener. Barcelona lost in Dubai and won at Besiktas. Paris beat Zalgiris 82-78 for their first win. Baskonia beat Milan 86-76 for theirs. Milan beat Virtus 87-85 in Round 2 on the offensive glass, 14 to 8.

The player of both rounds

Elijah Bryant won MVP of Round 2 and MVP of Round 3. Back-to-back, which nobody had done since Sasha Vezenkov in 2024-25.

In Round 2 at Belgrade he had 18 points, 10 rebounds, 4 assists and 4 steals against Crvena Zvezda, including nine free throws from nine attempts, for a PIR of 31, the highest of the round. In Round 3 against Real Madrid he had 22 points, a career-high 13 rebounds and seven assists, for a PIR of 40.

Here is the detail that makes it: Maledon also finished Round 3 on 40. The award goes to the highest PIR among players on winning teams, so the tie was settled by the result rather than by the number. Bryant's team won. Maledon's did not.

Our PIR leaderboard has the rest of the week behind him: Marcus Carr with 22 points and 10 assists in the Virtus win, Aliou Diarra with 18 and 14 in the same game, Kevin Punter's 25 in a Barcelona defeat in Dubai.

What the table says

Four teams are unbeaten after three rounds: Panathinaikos at 3-0 with a points difference of plus 65, Fenerbahce 3-0, Valencia 3-0 and Partizan 3-0. That is the first real shape of the season.

At the other end, Real Madrid and Maccabi Tel Aviv are both 0-3.

The whole table is on the standings page, and every result from the two rounds is on the Round 2 and Round 3 pages.

Three rounds is still a small sample. What it does tell you is who is ready. Panathinaikos have beaten Paris, ASVEL and Maccabi by 19, 23 and 23, which says more about their rotation being in order than about the opposition.

Next

Round 4 is played on the 7th, 8th and 9th of October, a normal week after an abnormal one. Previews go up as the fixtures firm up.

Two of them matter more than the rest. On Thursday, Panathinaikos host Fenerbahce in Athens: 3-0 against 3-0, the first meeting of the two teams who have looked most ready. On the same night Real Madrid host Partizan, who are also unbeaten. The eleven-time champions have one win to find and the hardest possible place to find it.