NANDO
Scoring virtuoso Nando De Colo became the fastest player ever to reaching 3,000 points in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague on Friday when he scored his final basket among 12 points in Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul's 73-63 home win over AX Armani Exchange Milan.
De Colo, who sits at exactly 3,000 points, is just the sixth player to reach that milestone, following Juan Carlos Navarro, Vassilis Spanoulis, Georgios Printezis, Paulius Jankunas and Felipe Reyes.
The 32-year-old Frenchman needed just 186 games to accumulate his total, well in advance of the other five. By comparison, Navarro reached 3,000 in his 220th game and Spanoulis in his 222nd. Printezis, Jankunas and Reyes all did so earlier this season with well over 300 games in their ledgers.
DeColo has won two EuroLeague titles in his six full seasons in the competition, in 2016 and 2019 with CSKA Moscow. In the first of those seasons, he was the only player ever to become the full-season MVP, the Final Four MVP and the Alphonso Ford Top Scorer Trophy winner. He has been a member of the All-EuroLeague First Team in 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18 and of the second team in 2014-15 and 2018-19.
De Colo began his EuroLeague career with Valencia Basket the season after becoming a EuroCup champion with that club, averaging 10.1 points in 19 games over a rookie run that ended in Game 5 of the playoffs. Three years later, he returned to the EuroLeague with CSKA Moscow and has proceeded to outscore everyone in his path since that moment. He has averaged better than 14.4 points in the last six seasons, including this one, for an average of 16.9 per game over that span. His total of 2,809 points since 2014 is almost 800 more than any other player.