On opening night of the 2007-08 season, a 20-year-old Milos Teodosic took the floor in a EuroLeague arena for the first time. It was at Peace and Friendship Stadium, the same place he will lead Virtus Segafredo Bologna into action against Olympiacos Piraeus.
Teodosic came off the bench for just 2 points and 1 assist in 13 minutes of a 95-90 victory over Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz that night in what was the start of not just a great career, but also a run in which Olympiacos would feature some of the best point guard play in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague.
How long ago was that game? So long that aside from Teodosic, only one other player (Kostas Vasileiadis) from that game is not yet retired. So long ago that it predates Vassilis Spanoulis’s arrival at the club.
Indeed, by Teodosic’s third season, he was the EuroLeague MVP. That same season, Kostas Sloukas made his EuroLeague debut with the Reds. And a year later, Spanoulis joined Olympiacos. Teodosic headed north to Moscow and signed with CSKA in 2011. That is when Sloukas returned from a year on loan to serve as Spanoulis’s sidekick for four full seasons, from 2011 through 2015, before he headed to Istanbul to win another EuroLeague crown with Fenerbahce. With Sloukas gone, when Olympiacos needed a combo guard to play next to Spanoulis, it brought in Daniel Hackett, who spent the 2015-16 and ’16-17 seasons in Piraeus.
