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Euro playmakers have thrived at Final Fours

Euro playmakers have thrived at Final Fours

Final Four News

17 May 20234 Mins read

Frank Lawlor

Euro playmakers have thrived at Final Fours

If you are wondering what common denominator might predict a Final Four team's success, look first at the playmakers.

In 20 editions of the Final Four since 2002, the MVP list is dominated by guards who either played the point full-time or had the ball in their hands consistently as double threats to score and pass. Such players have walked away as champions and MVPs on 13 of those 20 occasions.

The list includes the only three-time MVP this century, Vassilis Spanoulis, and a pair of two-time honorees as voted by the media on hand at the event, Dimitris Diamantidis and Vasilije Micic.

A closer look shows that all but one of those 13 MVPs, with the exception of Tyrese Rice in 2014 with Maccabi Tel Aviv, were European. Whether formally listed as point guards or not, one-time Final Four MVPs like Luka Doncic and Juan Carlos Navarro more than met the criteria as playmakers.

Of course, that's not to say that playmakers from outside of Europe haven't had major impact on title runs.

Besides Rice, whose main running mate for Maccabi in 2014 was Ricky Hickman, one of the finest Final Four performers of the late 2000s was CSKA Moscow floor general J.R. Holden. Although he shared the point guard role with another of the MVPs, Theo Papaloukas, it is Holden who still holds the record for total points in Final Fours since 2002. In the same light, Acie Law had the highest PIR when Olympiacos repeated as champion in 2013 and Spanoulis won his third MVP award.

Some of the single Final Four MVPs – like Sarunas Jasikevicius, who won it with Maccabi in 2005, and Nando De Colo, with CSKA in 2016 – were also instrumental in more than one title run. That was the case with Jasikevicius, in both 2003 with Barcelona and 2009 with Panathinaikos Athens, and De Colo in 2019 with CSKA. In other cases, the presence of European point guards who never won the MVP award was crucial to winning teams. That was the case for Ricky Rubio with Barcelona in 2011, Sergio Llull and Sergio Rodriguez with Real Madrid in 2015, especially, and Milos Teodosic for CSKA in 2017, when he had the highest PIR in the championship game.

Why European playmakers? Experience, mainly.

While non-European point guards usually have to learn the nuances of the game here – defensive freedom, spacing dynamics, tempo shifts and pacing – those who grew up here are steeped in those nuances from an early age. And, course, the intricacies of the high-speed chess match that is elite European basketball are most pronounced at the Final Four.

When an opponent successfully shuts down one aspect of a team's offense, another advantage usually opens up. The head coach may say as much in a timeout, but it takes the player with the ball in his hands to expose the defense's new weakness. Skills are essential, yes, but many years’ worth of playing high-pressure games in similar situations gives the point guard a sixth sense as to when to pull and when to push, and what arrows to pull out of his quiver.

A great example of such decision-making virtuosity was on display in the second half of Real's Game 5 win over Partizan Mozzart Bet Belgrade in the playoffs. Down 18 points early in the second half, Real's 36-year-old point guard, Sergio Rodriguez, started pulling all the strings he has used over the years. He exploited perimeter openings to hit and feed his teammates for three-pointers. When Partizan pressured outside, he practically found paths to the basket, where spaces had opened, to score what looked like easy layups. And when Partizan sent help defense at him to stop the layups, El Chacho lobbed to teammates for dunks. He found the hot hand of Llull for a crucial three-pointer off an inbounds with dwindling seconds on the shot clock. And he generally outfoxed Partizan at every turn and Real became the first team ever to come back from a 0-2 deficit to the Final Four. That was experience at work.

Every Final Four is different, but most winning teams have depended on Euro playmakers to a large extent. Let's see if that holds true this weekend in Kaunas, too.