Stats review: How the pick-and-roll has helped Hapoel's strong start

Sportradar explains how effective use of the pick-and-roll has been a key element for the top two teams in the standings

Only two teams have weathered the first five games of the 2025-26 EuroLeague Regular Season with a single loss: Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens and Hapoel IBI Tel Aviv. That duo ranks third and first in offensive efficiency, respectively, sharing one major characteristic that has driven their success in the early going.

Pick-and-roll play has only continued to grow its reach as the primary source of offense in the EuroLeague over the last decade. During the 2015-16 season, only three teams generated over 40% of their total offensive possession playing out of ball screens — that’s the league-average so far this season. While the league-wide rise in ball screen usage has flattened out in recent years after several seasons of significant growth, there continues to be individual teams pushing the upper limits of usage and efficiency most seasons.

This season, that team has been Hapoel, which, as the table above suggests, currently leads all teams in offensive efficiency by a solid margin, thanks specifically to its top-ranked volume and consistency scoring out of pick-and-rolls. With 49% of the team's possessions being used by its ball handlers, roll men, or the shooters and cutters receiving passes out of the two-man game, Coach Dimitris Itoudis’s team is in step with the record for volume set by Paris Basketball last year.

Hapoel's current efficiency falls behind only one team during the league’s pick-and-roll era: the 2022-23 Anadolu Efes Istanbul squad led by Hapoel's current starting point guard, Vasilije Micic. The former MVP has been one of several extremely efficient threats in the early going and ranks second in points scored and created out of pick-and-rolls per game as well. With Elijah Bryant and Chris Jones delivering steadily as secondary ball handlers, Hapoel has picked opposing defenses apart during their impressive start — notably with timely touches for the roll men and feeds to shooters on the weakside.

Panathinaikos may not be pushing the envelope quite as aggressively, but the Greens' usage and efficiency created out of pick-and-rolls would both rank among the top-10 in recent history as well. The quality play of reigning MVP Kendrick Nunn has been an important factor in that. Kostas Sloukas has been incredibly prolific on a per-minute basis passing out of pick-and-rolls off the bench and TJ Shorts has done a great job making plays for others, too, after setting the record for points created out of pick-and-rolls per game a year ago.

Hapoel and Panathinaikos can certainly point to their pick-and-roll play as the source of their early offensive success, but even the teams who do not rank prominently in pick-and-roll efficiency right now still score out of it at a very high level.

Efes and Olympiacos Piraeus, notably, are moving the needle to rank in the top eight with their efficiency elsewhere, but both average better than 0.96 points per possession — a mark that would have been well above average for a team’s overall efficiency not that long ago.

Though the parity around the current league landscape puts a premium on execution above all else, the caliber of pick-and-roll play across the first several weeks of the season is a big reason the bar is set so high. Moving forward, it will be fascinating to see how the league’s offensive efficiency evolves as numerous league and team records may be in jeopardy if early trends hold.