The Greens overturned a 14-point deficit against Real Madrid en route to winning the EuroLeague title
Panathinaikos flipped the championship game script like no team before
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Last Sunday night, Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens was able to celebrate winning its seventh Turkish Airlines EuroLeague crown and the club's first since 2011. And the Greens did so in style, not only during the season as a brand-new team with a new head coach, but also with the way they won the championship game in Berlin, Germany.
Panathinaikos found itself down by 14 points, 41-27, in the opening quarter, which made its eventual win the third-largest comeback in the championship game this century.
That is also tied for the fifth-largest winning comeback in any Final Four game since 2002, while Panathinaikos had never come back from a deficit larger than seven points in a Final Four game before Sunday.
The only other two occasions when a team came back from a larger deficit to win the EuroLeague title was done by a club Panathinaikos knows all too well – Olympiacos Piraeus. The Reds overturned a 19-point deficit in 2012 to stun CSKA Moscow, then a year later erased a 17-point deficit to beat Real Madrid in London.
Interestingly, in both of those games, Kostas Sloukas helped Olympiacos win the crown. On the other hand, Real has now been part of four of the top five biggest comebacks in championship game history, finding itself on the losing side on three occasions.
What Panathinaikos also did on Sunday in Berlin was set a new mark for the biggest victory by a team that was losing by double digits in the championship game.
The Greens trailed 41-27 early in the second before cutting the gap before halftime, then they managed to turn things around after the break and eventually celebrated an 80-95 win.
That margin of 29 points is tied with Olympiacos's triumph in 2013 for the biggest-ever point swing in a championship game, as Panathinaikos found itself down by as many as 14 points before eventually coming away with a 15-point triumph.
But that's not all. Panathinaikos actually led by as many as 18 points in the final moments of the game before Sergio Rodriguez's three-pointer set the final score. That difference of 32 points, from the Greens’ biggest deficit (14) to the largest lead (18), is the biggest point swing in a championship game in which the winner found itself down by more than a single basket.
The previous record (31) for such a point swing was held by Olympiacos in 2013, which trailed by 17 before going up by 14 points in overtime against Real Madrid.
Panathinaikos managed to flip the switch at just the right time, allowing it to achieve a memorable feat and secure a seventh star.