Olympiacos Are The Best Basketball Team Outside The NBA

Prior to the start of the season, after his NBA draft rights were traded to the Sacramento Kings, a profile in this space of Aleksandar “Sasha” Vezenkov examined his continuing growth from fringe EuroLeague rotation player to perhaps the best player in the competition.

That was back in June 2022, before this most recent season started. Since then, he has only gotten better. And as he has risen to the very top, so has his team.

On the season, in 28.8 minutes per game, Vezenkov is averaging 17.7 points, 7.0 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game, shooting a hefty .665 true shooting percentage. The points per game total leads the competition – with only 40-minute games, eleven-man rotations as a norm, more equal minute distributions due to the lack of superstars and a slower adoption of the pace-and-space principles that now define the NBA, very few players crack the 20 points per game mark in the EuroLeague – and the rebounds rank second.

Vezenkov is the overwhelming favourite to win this season’s Most Valuable Player award, as no one else in the competition requires quite as much defensive game-planning against as he does, while also producing so much despite that. And similarly, Olympiacos’ strategising around Vezenkov with the rest of their roster has seen them rise to the top of every competition they have been in.

Aided by a down year from their fierce rivals Panathinaikos (16-6), the Red and Whites have cruised through the Greek Basketball League, undefeated at 22-0 during the regular season and having won both of their playoff games so far by 24 points. They won the mid-season Cup competition, too, and finished atop the intracontinental EuroLeague regular season with a 24-10 record.

Within the EuroLeague, they have one of the best offences in the competition. They rank fourth in points per game at 83.6, and finished joint-second behind only Partizan Belgrade in offensive rating with a hefty 120.1 mark. Olympiacos of course do this largely through the varied competitions of Vezenkov – whose shooting, rolling, driving, movement, pick-and-pops, post-ups, cuts and spot-picking make him a constant weapon for a man who rarely dribbles – yet it is this fluidity of man and motion that he embodies that has made Olympiacos into such a constant offensive threat.

Consider for a minute that, per Synergy Sports, this same team with one of the best overall offences ranks dead last in the competition with a 0.777 points per possession mark in possessions used by pick-and-roll ball-handlers, and use the third-fewest isolation possessions. This is not a team pounding the ball into the court on the perimeter. Instead, they are occupying space, running hand-offs, floating passes to where defenders aren’t and cutting to get there before them.

All this is set up by excellent team-wide shooting. On the EuroLeague season, Olympiacos are shooting 38.0% from three-point range on 26.4 attempts per game, and as a team, they are scoring at a 59.8% effective field goal percentage on spot-up possessions. While none of the three-man centre rotation of Moustapha Fall, Tarik Black or Joel Bolomboy are jump shooters, everyone else is, and with four floor-stretching options on the court at anyone time – not least of which is Vezenkov, who leads the team in made threes and is third in percentage behind only fellow forwards Kostas Papanikolaou and Alec Peters – the lanes are always open accordingly, and roller are scoring at 1.362 points per possession as a result.

When end-of-the-clock guard creation is needed, veteran Kostas Sloukas still has some craft about him. Alongside the more cautious but precise-pick-and-roll-passing Thomas Walkup, Sloukas can cook, and has done so regularly in the clutch this season, the only other player on the deep Oly roster to average double figures in scoring (10.7). The overall unit works, and when it doesn’t, they have a bail-out option with a decade of pedigree to turn to (as well as Isaiah Canaan as an extra option).

On the other end of the court, things are even better. There, the Red and Whites lead the competition in defensive rating (108.7) and have a distinct gap to the field, and while the presence of the absolutely enormous Fall, the length of Bolomboy, the strength of Black, the rotations of Papanikolaou and the energy of Shaquielle McKissic all play their part, Walkup is the game winner on this end. Armed with tremendous hands, good feet and a relentless desire to disrupt, Walkup is a constant bother of opposing ball-handlers and a man who causes a lot of live-ball turnovers. Unless those opponents can play without a reliance on their ball-handlers like Olympiacos do, compete on the rebounding glass (where they are again amongst the best) and handle the all-around physicality that the Greek giants will throw at them, they might be in trouble.

In the first round of the EuroLeague playoffs, Olympiacos are tied 1-1 with Turkish powerhouse, Fenerbahce. For all this talk of their greatness above, they, like everyone in this format, are perilously close to elimination. One more loss, and it is all for nought.

That said, in developing one of the best players outside of the NBA, flanking him with commensurate talent, compiling a two-way team committed to each other, and being able to build continuity among the rotation (with both McKissic and Walkup signing multiple-year extensions, uncharacteristically for Americans in the EL), Olympiacos have put themselves in prime position. Variance cannot be helped, but smart basketball with defensive buy-in will always be part of the winning formula.