Olympiacos Wins the Greek Super Cup and the 46 Three-Point Crack Nobody Wants to See

In the 38th minute of the Greek Super Cup final in Athens, as PAOK cut the deficit to a single possession, I understood what a 21-point lead had concealed across the first two quarters. Olympiacos was not controlling the game with defense. They were controlling it with scoring velocity. And scoring velocity, at some point, always stops. The scoreboard read 101-96. The reigning European champion lifted the Greek Super Cup. For most of the arena, it was a winning night. For the notebook I have carried through thirty years on press row and in front of screens, it was a night of red flags written in ink that had not yet dried. Forty-six three-point attempts. PAOK launched 46 shots from beyond the arc in forty minutes. Nineteen went in — 41.3 percent. I rewatched the tape three times over the following two days, and each time the number appeared like an unwelcome whisper: Olympiacos' perimeter defense was exposing a gap that any elite EuroLeague shooting team could exploit. People call me a troublemaker. I am simply listening to the squeal of the wheel. Olympiacos entered the new season as defending EuroLeague champion. That status is peculiar in Europe, where the competitive structure grants no rest. Ahead of them lay two parallel battlegrounds: the EuroLeague, stretching across the season with dense scheduling, and the Greek Basket League (GBL) — the domestic stage where they share the summit with Panathinaikos in a relationship Greek media calls the "eternal rivals". The Greek Super Cup is an opening-season tournament, a formalized friendly cup staged before the domestic league begins. For big clubs it serves as both a fitness test and a showcase for new signings in front of the home crowd. But for head coach Georgios Bartzokas and the Olympiacos staff, it is also a chance to test unfinished tactical ideas. PAOK entered this tournament as a rising force in Greek basketball. During the preseason they beat Olimpia Milano, Partizan Belgrade, and pushed Panathinaikos to a dramatic semifinal. All three opponents were EuroLeague clubs. Those were not lucky wins. They were signals of a team that had found its formula. But PAOK entered the Super Cup final with a patched-together roster. They lost two interior players — Gray and Chougkaz — to injury. For a team with limited depth, the absence of two genuine options at the four forced their coach into uncomfortable choices. Osman, Persidis, and Calathes had to play power forward. That is not designed small-ball. That is small-ball by necessity. The game unfolded along an apparently easy script for Olympiacos. Early in the second half they led by 21. Sasha Vezenkov played like an untiring machine, attacking every mismatch PAOK offered. Evan Fournier launched decisive shots. Jean Montero — the twenty-three-year-old from the Dominican Republic — scored twenty points in an Olympiacos jersey for the first time in his career. Then the second half's second half arrived. And with it, Olympiacos' defensive wall began to crack. PAOK hit a three. Then another three. Then another. The 21-point lead shrank to fifteen, to ten, to five, to a single possession. In the closing minutes it was Montero who scored six decisive points to seal the win, with ice-cold accuracy. But when the final buzzer sounded and the Olympiacos players celebrated, one uncomfortable truth hung in the arena air: they had just allowed an opponent 46 three-point attempts in an official game. To analyze this seriously, one must start with what I call the "paint-versus-arc trade-off". When a defense decides to protect the paint by collapsing inward, it accepts a mathematical fact: perimeter defenders cannot be in two places at once. If Olympiacos' big men — Hall and N'Diaye — dominate the paint, as they did in this game, the opponent has no choice but to shoot from outside. Logically, conceding threes is the price of protecting the rim. But that price is only rational when the opponent cannot shoot. When an opponent goes 19-of-46 — 41.3 percent — the price has exceeded reason. More troubling is that this is not new. Across all four Super Cup games, and through the preseason friendlies, Olympiacos allowed similar three-point volume. Coach Bartzokas has publicly flagged the issue and admitted it needs fixing. A defensive problem that the coach knows, acknowledges, and that still recurs — that is a systemic hole, not a one-night accident. Here I must ask a hard question: is this a deliberate tactical choice, or an execution failure? Reading the game data, I lean toward the second hypothesis. If Olympiacos deliberately chose drop coverage — a scheme where the big man sags to protect the rim and concedes outside shots — they would need perimeter defenders fast enough to close out and pressure those looks. But on tape I saw many possessions where Olympiacos defenders arrived late on close-outs, or worse, helped into the paint too early and unnecessarily. In other words: Olympiacos is over-helping. They help so much in the paint that they abandon shooters beyond the arc in comfortable spots. That is fixable, but it demands tactical change and individual discipline. It is especially dangerous at EuroLeague level, where elite clubs like Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Fenerbahce have shooters capable of punishing any gap. The brightest individual note was Sasha Vezenkov with twenty-five points and ten rebounds — an MVP-caliber line. But more interesting than the numbers is how he scored. Vezenkov "mercilessly attacked all mismatches", as the club's own blog put it. That phrase captures the role Bartzokas built for him: a forward who reads the game to find weakness in the opposing scheme and attacks it without hesitation. Against PAOK, Vezenkov repeatedly exploited mismatches created by PAOK's improvised small-ball lineups. When PAOK had to send a guard or wing onto him at forward, he immediately leveraged height and post skill. When PAOK switched a slower big onto him, he dragged that big beyond the arc and attacked with range finishing. That is the essence of mismatch hunting — preying on asymmetry. And Vezenkov is among Europe's best at it. At nearly thirty, Vezenkov sits at his career peak. Crucially, his game does not depend on speed or raw athleticism, but on shooting skill, reading, and tactical understanding. That is the kind of player age touches far less than physical wings. In other words: Vezenkov is Olympiacos' solid foundation for at least two to three more seasons. Evan Fournier scored nineteen in the final. That number shocks nobody who watched him in the NBA. What matters is context: Fournier plays his best when titles are at stake. The Olympiacos blog describes him as a player who "shines when titles are on the table". That is a rare trait, and the main reason he was brought to Athens. Yet I must say plainly what some Olympiacos fans may not wish to hear: Fournier is in the early stage of physical decline. He is around thirty, and for wings who create their own space, athletic decline typically accelerates after thirty. That does not mean he is finished. His shooting remains elite, and his big-game capacity is irreplaceable. But it means the staff must manage his minutes carefully. Across a two-front season, preserving Fournier for the biggest games — especially the EuroLeague playoffs — will be decisive. This is one of the calculations Olympiacos leadership prepared for by adding names like McIntyre and Papas to share the wing load. Of all the individual stories, Jean Montero's is the most compelling. The twenty-three-year-old from the Dominican Republic scored twenty — his first such game for Olympiacos — including six points in the final minute to preserve the win. To grasp the significance, one must know his résumé: a Spanish league champion, a EuroLeague first-team honoree, and a player famed for a sprinter's first step. He fits the archetype American analysts call a downhill guard — a guard who attacks the rim directly with speed and explosion. But in the PAOK game, one detail drew my attention more than the points: his ball control in the closing minutes. Montero did not merely score; he did it with the composure of a player who had logged hundreds of big games. Amusingly, the Olympiacos blog itself joked that Montero "cannot really be only twenty-three". It was a joke, but it revealed something: Montero carries psychological maturity well beyond his age. Still, I will not paint a rosy picture. In the game, Montero committed three turnovers. That number sounds small, but in a EuroLeague playoff decided by a few possessions, three giveaways can be the difference between winning and losing. Montero is a high-variance player: he can produce spectacular plays and costly errors. In open-floor transition he is a weapon. In slow half-court games where the defense is set, he is easily targeted. The key metric to track over Montero's next twenty games is turnover rate. If he keeps it under 2.5 per game, he is ready for a larger EuroLeague role. If it climbs above 3.5, the staff will need to reconsider his role in knockout games. A small but important note from the Olympiacos blog concerned McIntyre: good defense, poor shooting. That defines an archetype in European basketball — an elite defender without a reliable outside shot. In the regular season such a player can contribute by containing opposing playmakers. But in the playoffs, as spacing tightens, a non-shooter compresses the entire offense. The problem intensifies when McIntyre shares the floor with other non-shooters. Bartzokas will need to calculate lineup combinations carefully, especially in close EuroLeague games. Among the most intriguing details about this season's Olympiacos is the signing of Bryant Dunston, now forty-one. Dunston was not brought in to produce on the floor. He was brought in as a locker-room "father figure" — a culture binder and a support for younger players. For a club chasing titles on two fronts, such players matter in maintaining psychological stability through the season's hard stretches. But there is a more important tactical angle: Dunston can obtain a Greek passport because he married a Greek woman. If that happens, he counts as a domestic player in the GBL rather than a foreign one. That is a high-level roster-architecture move. The GBL mandates a minimum number of domestic players. If Dunston becomes domestic, Olympiacos frees a foreign slot for its core stars. This is a strategic edge that could prove decisive in key GBL games. Alongside that, signing George Papas — a Greek international with prior Olympiacos experience — was described as "acquired for safety". That is a classic contender move: ensuring roster depth for a long season with countless games and injury risk. In a season where Milutinov and Jones have already been absent through injury, the presence of insurance bodies like Papas becomes more vital than ever. At this point I must ask: am I exaggerating? There is a sound argument that Olympiacos won the game, and in basketball winning is everything. The Greek Super Cup — a short, less competitive tournament than the EuroLeague or GBL — is a reasonable place to test defensive schemes. Perhaps Bartzokas deliberately chose to concede threes to test his team's response. I accept that argument in part. I do not accept it as a full explanation. Because the perimeter-defense problem did not appear in a single game. It appeared across all four Super Cup games and the friendlies. That is not a one-off tactical choice for a specific matchup. It is a recurring behavioral pattern. Moreover, Bartzokas himself publicly acknowledged it as a problem needing improvement. When a EuroLeague-caliber coach speaks aloud about a defensive issue, it genuinely exists. The second point of self-criticism: am I fixating on 46 three-point attempts and ignoring other factors? A fair question. In modern basketball, the volume of threes a team allows is not always the most important metric. The quality of those attempts matters more — whether they were open, comfortable looks or pressured ones. If PAOK shot 41.3 percent under tight defense, that is a positive for Olympiacos. If they shot that under no pressure at all, it is a negative. On tape I saw both. Some PAOK threes were difficult and contested. Many others were wide open, with shooters having ample time to set their feet. That reinforces my read, but it also reminds me my analysis rests on a small sample. This is a preseason game. Conclusions should be treated as directional, not absolute. The third point: is Montero genuinely a rising star, or did he simply get lucky in one game? I cannot answer definitively after one game. Montero has the tools — skill, athleticism, late-game calm. But one twenty-point game does not define a career. At least ten to fifteen games are needed to judge whether he can sustain this at EuroLeague level. The same applies to the entire Olympiacos story this season. This is a defending European champion with a high-quality roster. But quality on paper does not guarantee wins on the floor. In European basketball, where the gap between top clubs narrows each year, any complacency can produce defeat. Germany 0-2 South Korea was not a surprise — it was a parable about the arrogance of the front-runner. So what do we learn from this Greek Super Cup? First: Olympiacos remains a EuroLeague-champion-caliber team. With Vezenkov, Fournier, and Montero, they have enough firepower to beat any European opponent on a given night. Second: the perimeter-defense hole is real and must be solved before the EuroLeague playoffs. If Olympiacos allows 46 three-point attempts in a EuroLeague game, they will lose. Simple as that. Third: PAOK is no longer an easy GBL opponent. With wins over Olimpia Milano and Partizan, plus their Super Cup final display, they have shown the gap with Greek elite clubs is narrowing. In single games, they can produce upsets. My verifiable predictions for this season: One, Olympiacos will allow forty or more three-point attempts at least three times in the early EuroLeague stretch. If so, it confirms a systemic problem. Two, Montero will sustain scoring but will have at least two games with four or more turnovers within his first twenty. His turnover rate will decide his playoff role. Three, PAOK will beat at least one of the eternal rivals — Olympiacos or Panathinaikos — in a regular-season GBL game. That will be the clearest sign of a shifting power balance in Greek basketball. The transfer market is the only place on earth where absurdity is celebrated as art. But basketball does not run on transfer-market logic. It runs on the logic of the floor — where every defensive error can be punished, and every win must be re-earned from scratch. Olympiacos has won the Greek Super Cup. But the season has only just begun. And in European basketball, a September trophy guarantees nothing for May.