If you ever wondered why Turkish Airlines EuroLeague teams who are about to win or lose a game in the waning seconds decide to call timeouts or foul the other team or similar, there's a logical explanation: Playoff places and positions in the standings can be decided by the very slimmest of margins, as illustrated by an example from the recent past that involves two opponents playing the first game on Thursday this week, Zalgiris Kaunas and Olympiacos Piraeus.
When they also played in the penultimate round of the 2018-19 regular season, a player whose EuroLeague career spanned all of eight games missed a seemingly innocuous three-point shot before the final buzzer that changed the fates of those two teams.
A few weeks earlier that season, which featured 16 teams and therefore 30 regular season games, Zalgiris was sitting on a 9-15 record with six games to play. By the time Zalgiris visited Olympiacos in Round 29, it had four consecutive victories for a 13-15 record to sit in 10th place, just behind the Reds and three more teams with 14-14 records
Zalgiris, having rallied from 12 points behind in the third quarter, had the game won when Marius Grigonis hit 2 free throws to make it 72-68 with 3.8 seconds left, too little time for the Reds to score twice. Without a timeout, Olympiacos inbounded the ball to Briante Weber, who had time to race the length of the floor and took a lightly-guarded three-pointer on the wing. It missed.
Weber, a mid-season pickup for Olympiacos, had already scored 26 points in the game. But at that moment, as you can see in the video below, the Zalgiris defenders were making sure to stay away from Weber so as not to endanger their already-sure victory with a four-point play. Little did they know that if Weber had made that shot, even though they were completing a 2-0 sweep of Olympiacos, Zalgiris would have missed the playoffs.