The NBA Prospects Of Memphis Grizzlies Draft Pick, Tarik Biberovic

In the recent past, Turkish men’s basketball was a hot ticket.

Having never qualified for it prior, the country’s national team finally made a FIBA World Cup in 2002 and record four wins on their way to a ninth-placed finish. Four years later, they recorded six wins on their way to sixth place, and then in 2010 came the pinnacle; a silver medal. Going undefeated in five group games, victories over France, Slovenia and Serbia set up a final against the United States, and, along with a 2001 Eurobasket silver medal, one of their only two top-three finishes in any major international competition ever.

That Turkish team was a stacked one. Hedo Turkoglu was at the height of his powers, and Ersan Ilyasova was getting close to his, while fellow NBA players Omer Asik and Semih Erden manned the lane. The veteran guard group of Omer Onan, Kerem Tunceri, Ender Arslan and Sinan Guler formed the heart of the team, and, aided by the significant advantage of also being the host nation, they had their best result ever.

Home court advantage in Turkiye hits a little different to other places, and, bolstered by that, Turkiye has also produced three of the last six EuroLeague champions (Fenerbahce in 2017, Anadolu Efes in 2021 and 2022). However, since that 2010 run, the national team has cooled off. They fell to an eighth-place finish in the 2014 Worlds, to 22nd in the 2019 edition, and did not qualify at all for the 2023 tournament, while also still not qualifying for the Olympics (which they have not done since 1952).

In part, this is because the next generation of prospects did not work out. Cedi Osman and Furkan Korkmaz became solid NBA players, but not needle-movers, and others 90s-born Turkish prospects (Izzet Turkyilmaz, Ismet Akpinar, Ilkan Karaman, Birkan Batuk, Metecan Birsen, Kenan Sipahi, Tolga Gecim, etc) never reached the heights of their forebears. Enes Kanter did, but his time with the national team was brief, and thus aside from the exception of Alperen Sengun, high-calibre prospects have been been coming through.

With the Tunceri generation long gone, Turkiye have been overly reliant on a nationalised Shane Larkin. It warrants a mention, then, that a new Turkish prospect has joined the NBA – Fenerbahce wing Tarik Biberovic was drafted 56th overall in last week’s draft by the Memphis Grizzlies.

Of course, he too a nationalised player. Biberovic was born in Bosnia to Bosnian parents, but joined Fenerbahce in 2017 and was granted Turkish citizenship in 2020. Nevertheless, he is Turkish now, and, as is often the custom with picks at the very end of the draft, the Grizzlies opted to pick an automatically-eligible international player (by virtue of being born in 2001) who is not a candidate to play in the NBA any time soon.

The trouble is, Biberovic is not playing much in the EuroLeague, either.

It is certainly true that young players rarely play in the EuroLeague. But Biberovic, now 22 and a half years old, is not as young as he was, and thus that reasoning should not apply like it does. This past season, as his Fenerbahce team made the postseason and were a tough first-round out to eventual runners-up Olympiacos, Biberovic was a passenger, appearing in only 123 minutes across 12 games in the whole of the EuroLeague season, and with most of those minutes coming from outside of the rotation.

Deemed insufficient for the EuroLeague rotation, Biberovic has therefore done the bulk of his work over the last three seasons in Turkiye’s domestic league, the BSL. This past season, in 342.5 minutes across 24 games, he averaged 5.3 points and 2.9 rebounds, and although he shot only a 39.3% conventional field goal percentage, the high volume of three-pointers T-Bibs attempted salvaged a .531 true shooting percentage.

That, though, still does not wow. Considering that Biberovic’s role with Fenerbahce currently (and projected role in the NBA, if any) is as an off-ball wing shooting option, he needs to hit more than the 34.8% from three that he shot across all competitions last season. It is true that his 2020/21 (44.3%) and 2021/22 (41.8%) marks surpassed his 2022/23 figure, in what proved to be a down shooting year. But it is also true that his role has not increased, his production has not increased, and that his skill set has not expanded.

Nevertheless, the past is not the future. And even if Biberovic’s only above-average skill is his shooting stroke, it is the right skill to have.

With good size for the wing, standing 6’7, Biberovic combines his shooting stroke with the effort and intelligence to get open. The movement is sharp, the sliding and curls are tight, and the release on the shot is quick. The feet, though, are not. And so despite the nice off-ball offensive profile if he can take some more steps forward as a shooter, Biberovic has a lot to prove defensively to get beyond the Turkish league level. The step-ups in athletic level from there to the EuroLeague rotation, and then from the EuroLeague to the NBA, are sizeable.

Biberovic’s most obvious point of comparison is perhaps a recent Mr Irrelevant. Drafted with the 60th and final pick in 2019 by the Sacramento Kings, Vanja Marinkovic – then of the Serbian giants Partizan Belgrade, now of fellow EuroLeague team Baskonia in Spain – fitted the same profile as Biberovic, while also an automatic entry draft candidate coming through very similar circumstances. At the time of Marinkovic’s drafting, I wrote this about him:

• Marinkovic has been the beneficiary of this year’s draft class that, for whatever reason, has been short of draft-and-stash prospects. He is thus considered one by default, but the relative exoticism of him being European and thus more unknown in NBA circles does not necessarily mean that he is better as a prospect than many graduating seniors in this class.
• The core and indeed majority of Marinkovic’s game is wing catch-and-shoot possessions. He is aggressive with the shot, always looking to get open for looks and always calling for the ball. Yet never has he been an especially efficient outside shooter. He looks like he should be, with a compact and fairly quick release, good confidence and good movement to get open, but he simply does not make that many of them. Given that he himself is not a particularly good athlete, that is partly why, but in seven years of senior level play with Partizan Belgrade now, only in fits and starts has he been more than a mid 30% outside shooter.
• Mid 30% on a good volume is fine as long as the rest of the game is there. Marinkovic is however a bit one-dimensional, especially when projecting him to the NBA. He is not an athlete and he does not handle in traffic, so while he will make some good decisions out of curl plays as to when to shoot, when to go to the basket and when to pass off of his own scoring threat, he is not one to create or isolate. He also is weak defensively, not making any kind of impression with physicality or speed, and the package he offers is fairly limited. Some movement, some shooting, few turnovers, few risks taken…..and that’s about it.

You can change “Marinkovic” to “Biberovic”, and the scouting report is nigh-on identical.

If Marinkovic was very similar to Biberovic up until this point, then maybe he will continue to be going forwards. In the four years since his selection, Marinkovic has made slow but measurable progress in the European game, getting stronger and more controlled and becoming a better shooter, averaging 9.1 points in 19.9 minutes per game in EuroLeague play for Baskonia last year on 40.3% three-point shooting.

Were that the baseline Marinkovic was operating from when he was drafted aged 22 and a half, an NBA window might have been possible. As it is, it now looks unlikely. And so for the highly similar Biberovic, to go one step further, he will simply need to hit more shots to overcome all of that which he does not do.