Olympiacos vs ASVEL

Due to tiebreakers, the seasoned Greek squad is now in fifth place in the rankings after winning five of their eight EuroLeague games this season. Three other teams are in hot pursuit. With a score of 94-89 in their most recent match, Olympiacos defeated Panathinaikos on the road in a vital victory.

The French squad is still among the lower-ranked teams in the EuroLeague after winning only two of their first eight games. The last quarter, when ASVEL was outscored by five points, dealt the finishing blow in their most recent home loss to Fenerbahce, 73-77. With six victories in eight games, ASVEL is doing rather well in the French league and is still in the lead.

In terms of statistics, these offensive rebounds were crucial, particularly while facing Panathinaikos, who have excellent paint defense and are among the league's top teams when it comes to giving up offensive rebounds. Olympiacos boasts the fourth-best defense in the league, giving up 110.8 points per 100 possessions, or 78.1 points per game, based on advanced analytics. They lead in assists, averaging 21.5 per game, and are somewhat behind offensively, ranking fifth with 118.1 points per 100 possessions. Olympiacos averages 71 possessions per game and plays at a moderate tempo.

Olympiacos came from a glorious victory in the last game held in EuroLeague having beaten Panathinaikos on their own turf 94-89 and is now on a roll having registered 5 victories out of 8 games in the elite competition. The most for this success were scored by, such brilliant players as Evan Fournier with 22 and Sasha Vezenkov with 20, that was enough.

Olympiacos began the new season somewhat weaker and did have certain problems after five rounds, but then very significantly upgraded its performance and achieved three very valuable victories as part of highly combative teams.

First Real Madrid and then Barcelona were defeated by them and, as the culmination of the excellent results of Georgios Bartzokas’s team, Athens’s Panathinaikos. This doubtless helped the Greek squad’s morale, especially because the victory came on Olympiacos’s turf against their biggest enemy. During that game, the side of Pierou, expressed to the European champions from the first minutes, that they have come to win.

They threatened to take a double-digit lead in the beginning of the second quarter and did, reaching a close high of 14 points, thanks to a splendid display of second quarter offense and switching defense that confused Panathinaikos for most of the first half. In such situations Olympiacos was able to get steal and get some very easy buckets, which energized them at the beginning, until mid second period when Panathinaikos decided to put up more intensity on offense, thus increasing their own scoring rate as well.

Olympiacos had some problems in the later moments of the game but an O Rebound by Nikola Milutinov during Panathinaikos’s first attack kept Olympiacos alive again and later the duo of Sasha Vezenkov and Evan Fournier was the difference as they shut down the crucial moments and left the opponent too cold to respond.