His Greens now sit in the driver's seat in the race for home-court advantage in the playoffs
Confident Ataman proving infectious at Panathinaikos
Elite sportspeople come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from different backgrounds, with different personalities and with different strengths and abilities.
But they tend to share one common characteristic: unshakeable self-belief.
The kind of confidence that allows them to overcome obstacles, banish past failures, make the most of opportunities and express their talents. The kind of confidence necessary to become a winner, even when losing might be the more likely outcome.
In the world of European basketball, nobody in recent years has exuded more self-belief than Ergin Ataman.
Regularly reminding everybody that he had won every trophy available except the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague title, Ataman arrived at a habitually underperforming Anadolu Efes Istanbul and had the force of personality and internal strength of character to help a talented bunch of players do just that. Twice.
And now he’s doing it again.
When Ataman took over at Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens last summer, he wasted no time in openly stating that his ambition is to take the team to the Final Four – quite a bold pledge for a team that finished next-to-bottom in last season’s standings, hasn’t reached the semifinals for more than a decade and had the task of finding instant chemistry with an almost entirely new roster and a new coaching staff.
It didn’t take long for Ataman’s new-look Panathinaikos to hit its stride, and Friday night’s thrilling 79-81 win at Virtus Segafredo Bologna means the Greens still have their top-four fate in their own hands: victory in the final two games of the regular season, at Bayern and at home to ALBA Berlin, would ensure home-court advantage in the playoffs. And for a team that hasn’t lost at home since December, that would mean an extremely good chance of fulfilling Ataman’s Final Four ambition.
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The latest triumph was secured by a player who shares Ataman’s sense of self-belief, with Kendrick Nunn hitting a game-winning floater on the final buzzer just a few days after declaring himself to be the best offensive player in the competition.
The numbers don’t even come close to agreeing with Nunn’s assertion. With an average of 14.8 points per game, Nunn ranks only ninth in the league in scoring, with an average output roughly 25% lower than league leader Mike James, who also happens to be the competition’s all-time leading scorer.
In terms of assists, Nunn’s 3.0 dimes per night don’t even rank in the EuroLeague’s top 25, and neither do his – let's be honest – mediocre shooting percentages of 45.3% from two-point range and 36.4% from beyond the arc.
In fact, considering his average PIR of 10.1 - considerably lower than Kostas Sloukas, Jerian Grant, Dinos Mitoglou and Mathias Lessort, and exactly the same as Marius Grigonis – it would be difficult to argue that Nunn is the best offensive player in his team, never mind the whole league.
But that’s not the point. The point is that coach Ataman’s unshakeable belief in his own abilities is trickling down into his team.
Over the last few years, Panathinaikos has been a sorry story of underachievement, finishing 16th, 13th, and 17th in the last three seasons and rarely looking like a playoffs team, never mind a Final Four contender.
Turning around that sequence requires more than just talent. It also requires a mindset shift, the nature of which Ataman successfully instilled at Efes, another perennial underachiever before he turned the Turkish team into back-to-back champions.
So it doesn’t matter whether Nunn’s claim to be the best offensive player in the league is somewhat over-inflated. What matters is that with a must-win game tied up on the last possession, he had the ability and the confidence to calmly dribble the ball towards the Virtus basket, wait until the shot clock had almost expired and then casually flip up a game-winning floater that keeps Panathinaikos’s Final Four ambitions very much on track.
Let's see how far that confidence can take them.