The Reds are regulars in the postseason and now they will play a five-game series again.
Olympiacos returns to the playoffs
Olympiacos Piraeus is back to the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Playoffs, with a chance to punch its ticket to Berlin!
It has been yet another solid regular season for Olympiacos, which made it to the playoffs for the third consecutive year, each time with head coach Georgios Bartzokas on the bench.
Olympiacos mathematically qualified to the playoff in Round 33 after beating Crvena Zvezda Meridianbet Belgrade 86-89 in the Serbian capital. Since the playoffs returned to the EuroLeague in 2005, Olympiacos has qualified as many as 15 times, winning back-to-back EuroLeague titles in 2012 and 2013.
The Reds have a chance to make history, too. Olympiacos has never qualified to three consecutive Final Fours. After reaching the championship game in 2015 and 2017, Olympiacos returned to the Final Four in 2022. It made it to another championship game in 2023, losing the title in the final shot. If the Reds make it to Berlin, they hope that the third time's a charm.
Olympiacos kept a core of players last summer but also signed new ones – before and during the season – as well as bringing back former stars. Its initial goal has been matched, as Olympiacos secured a top-six finish. The next step is trying to get the home-court advantage to have bigger chances to return to the Final Four.
New leaders step up
A couple of key departures forced Olympiacos to find new leaders. Instead of looking for them in the market, Coach Bartzokas opted to trust some of the players he already had in the team and the move has paid off really well. Isaiah Canaan and Alec Peters improved their numbers from one season to the next, leading Olympiacos back to the playoffs.
Peters had the biggest shoes to fill, replacing 2022-23 EuroLeague MVP Sasha Vezenkov as the team's starting power forward. Last season, Peters averaged 4.6 points on 41.1% three-point shooting, 2.5 rebounds and a PIR of 4.5. With a starting role, Peters is averaging 13.8 points on 52.6% three-point shooting, 4.9 rebounds and a PIR of 15.2.
In need of more backcourt scoring punch, Bartzokas turned to Canaan to provide the fireworks. He averaged 6.3 points on 38.2% three-point shooting and a PIR of 3.4 last season. In the current campaign, Canaan went from taking 3.7 three-pointer per game to 5.5, averaging 11.5 points on great shooting accuracy (57.1% 2FG, 43.6% 3FG, 90.4% FT) and a PIR of 8.9.
Canaan and Peters have opened the floor for the Reds from beyond the arc, combining for 297 three-point attempts and allowing Moustapha Fall, Nikola Milutinov and Moses Wright to get more space in the paint.
Defense comes first
This season, Olympiacos has the EuroLeague's best defense, allowing just 74.5 points per game, almost three fewer than any other team. Opponents are hitting just 52.0% of their shots inside the arc and 35.7% from three-point range against the Reds. Despite those many missed shots, Olympiacos allows opponents just 9.6 offensive rebounds on average.
Defense has been a staple of most teams coached by Bartzokas. Last season, Olympiacos allowed a league-low 75.2 points per game. When Bartzokas took Lokomotiv Kuban Krasnodar to the 2016 Final Four, it did it with the best defense in the competition (71.2 ppg.). Bartzokas led Olympiacos to the 2012-13 title allowing just 72.7 points per night, too.
Home has been good to the Reds
Gaining the home-court advantage remains a big goal for Olympiacos considering that the Reds have a 39-8 regular season home record in the last three seasons. This season, however, all four Spanish teams won at the Peace and Friendship Stadium: Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz and Valencia Basket.
Looking back, however, Olympiacos and Coach Bartzokas's teams did not fully capitalize on that home-court advantage. Over the last two seasons, Olympiacos lost one of its two games at home in the playoffs, to AS Monaco in 2022 and to Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul in 2023. The Reds were forced to win on the road to take the series to Game 5. Back in 2016, Bartzokas's Lokomotiv also lost the home-court advantage to Barca in the 2016 playoffs, too.
Once those series reached Game 5, however, home court was worth its weight in gold, just as it was in Game 5 in 2013, when Bartzokas and Olympiacos beat Efes at home to go on and defend the EuroLeague title at the Final Four in London. All told, Bartzokas is 4-0 in playoff Game 5s.
The Reds are back in the playoffs, hoping to make the most our of their experience and talent when the playoffs start on April 23!