Olympiacos Piraeus takes on Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul in this year's Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Playoffs. Both teams have strengths and weaknesses, and finding them out before your opponent finds out yours should be the biggest key to this series.
Fenerbahce head coach Dimitris Itoudis is going to the playoffs without the home-court advantage for the first time in his EuroLeague head coaching career, and Olympiacos is arguably the favorite to go all the way.
Olympiacos has plenty of reasons to be self-confident. The Reds ranked first at the end of the regular season with a 24-10 record, were 14-3 at home and enter the playoffs on a nine-game winning streak at Peace and Friendship Stadium, where they've been undefeated in 2023. Overconfidence, however, has been an issue in the past, so keeping that in mind should help head coach Georgios Bartzokas's team.
In 2011, Olympiacos opened its playoffs series with a overwhelming 89-41 home win against Montepaschi Siena, breaking a lot of records, but went on to lose its next three games and miss the Final Four. The Reds learned from their mistakes: in 2012, the same teams met again in the playoffs, but even when Siena had the home-court advantage, Olympiacos stole Game 1 on the road and stayed strong at home to win the series and, eventually, lift the EuroLeague trophy.
In 2017 and 2022, Olympiacos lost one home game each to Anadolu Efes Istanbul and AS Monaco, respectively, but still managed to make it to the Final Four. In 2018, Olympiacos could not overcome a Game 1 overtime home loss to Zalgiris and lost that series 1-3. Being fully focused at home and turning Peace and Friendship Stadium into the fortress it was in Game 5 against Monaco last season is one of the biggest keys for the Reds.
Olympiacos is well on its way to finishing the season with the best assist ratio in competition history. So far, Olympiacos has dished 21.8 assists per game, better than the current record of 21.4 held by Real Madrid since the 2014-15 season. Olympiacos needs its two pass-first point guards, Thomas Walkup and Kostas Sloukas, to dictate the tempo and get the team's best finishers involved – Sasha Vezenkov in particular.
Fenerbahce, of course, has its own strengths. Coach Itoudis is a master of finding advantages during the games, reading situations and capitalizing on them. Fenerbahce has a lot of versatility at forward and center, whether opening the floor with DyShawn Pierre and Nigel Hayes-Davis together on court, or using centers Johnathan Motley and Tonye Jekiri at the same time to find dominate the paint.
Disrupting Olympiacos's rhythm is one of the keys and Fenerbahce has the optimal players to do so. Nick Calathes has been playing against Sloukas and Walkup for many years and Tyler Dorsey was their teammate last season, so both have plenty of information that goes beyond plain scouting.
It remains to be seen in which physical condition Nemanja Bjelica will be in this series. So far, Bjelica has gone unnoticed, but he is the same player that averaged 10 minutes per night in the NBA playoffs last season, helping Golden State win the title. Bjelica has an unique combination of experience, talent, ballhandling and versatility that could make him the x-factor in this series.
The pressure is on Olympiacos, and it has not always used its home-court advantage well in the past. Luckily for the Reds, history does not determine what happens on the court, and Bartzokas will have then ready for a big playoffs battle. Olympiacos fans should not expect an easy series: Fenerbahce missed the playoffs last season after six consecutive appearances and is back to use its weapons and make some noise. EuroLeague fans are in for a treat: it should be a truly exciting series!
