Stats review: Offensive efficiency in the EuroLeague continues to rise

Sportradar shines a light on the great scoring efficiency in the opening rounds of the 2025-26 season

The EuroLeague is back, and the early returns are, frankly, spectacular. While a lot of things changed coming into this season, with three teams added to fill the expanded 20-team field, a few coaching changes, and several marquee signings, the opening week sustained the league’s most prominent trend on the floor: unmatched efficiency.

The graph above shows the number of points per-possession scored since the EuroLeague's inception in the 2000-01 season.

While there was a ramp-up in the seasons following the pandemic, the EuroLeague has hovered around record levels of efficiency for the last three years, finally breaking the record set during the 2017-18 season last year. Usually, there are some expected bumps in the road early in the regular season as teams build their chemistry and find a rhythm, but Rounds 1 and 2 set a different tone last week as most teams came sprinting out of the gates executing, shooting the three, and taking care of the ball at high levels. Given the league’s inclination for parity, the roster quality of the clubs joining this season, and the way the league has steadily raised the bar on offensive efficiency in recent years, it is fair to wonder if last season’s record was more of a stepping stone than the boundary the league’s last two major spikes proved to be.

History can only tell us so much beyond the last decade about the next step in the EuroLeague's offensive progression, as the brand of basketball in the first decade of the competition was very different in a few key facets — notably three-point rate and playcalling. Early on, the league’s numbers usually ebbed and flowed with how effectively teams translated their group phase efficiency into the Top 16. The teams during the 2003-04 season were so good offensively in the second phase that the 47.6% field goal percentage from that year still stands as the EuroLeague record, with the resulting overall efficiency record holding until the 2017-18 campaign.

That season’s offensive fireworks came on the heels of the EuroLeague's first season of double round-robin play in 2016-17. The stabilizing effect the league’s current format has had on offensive performance is obvious, but that season saw positive swings in three-point shooting and turnover rate that have continued into the offensive renaissance that has gotten back on track after being derailed for a time by the pandemic.

While its obviously still very early, it is hard to look at the starts of Zalgiris Kaunas under new head coach Tomas Masiulis, Valencia Basket in their return to the league with a new arena, Hapoel IBI Tel Aviv on neutral courts with a former MVP leading the charge, and Dubai Basketball with their stellar shooting performance in Round 1 and not wonder just how high the league can fly offensively this year. There is no guarantee that the explosive offensive play of the first week will carry on at such a high level all year, but the early returns of the 2025-26 season have done little to suggest that we are not, at least probably, watching a historic standard of professional basketball.