By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Athens’ Telekom Center had thousands of people crammed inside for last season’s EuroLeague final between Olympiacos and Real Madrid, and by the fourth quarter, most of the partisan Greek crowd in attendance weren’t really watching a basketball game anymore — they were watching thirteen years of hurt finally come to an end. The Thrylos had been to the Finals three times since their most recent triumph back in 2013, and on each occasion, they had left empty-handed.
This time, though, the Reds arrived at their own Final Four as the best team in Europe by the numbers, a 26-12 regular season that made them the top seed, with Sasha Vezenkov — back home after chasing this exact outcome since his return in 2024 — collecting the season MVP award. They swept Monaco, then met Fenerbahçe in the semifinal and dismantled them, 79-61, inside the Telekom Center.
Olympiacos’ Lengthy Drought Finally Comes to an End
Nobody in Athens needed reminding what a Real Madrid final meant. Los Blancos came out throwing haymakers, Trey Lyles scoring 21 of his eventual 24 points before halftime, and for a stretch, it looked like history was going to repeat itself in the cruelest way. But this time, Olympiacos wouldn’t let the same heartbreaking fate befall them. Ten lead changes. Five ties. The scoreboard read 80-80 with two minutes left before Evan Fournier and Alec Peters closed it out at the free-throw line, 92-85, and Georgios Bartzokas — the same coach who’d delivered the club’s last title back in 2013 — was lifted onto his players’ shoulders.
What happens next tells you almost as much as the final itself. Bartzokas got extended through 2029 within weeks, and the roster since has barely moved. When you’ve just built the best team in Europe, it’s all about continuity, and it’s a tactic that online betting sites seem to agree with.
The latest basketball odds at https://thunderpick.io/sports/basketball make Olympiacos a 3/1 joint favorite to repeat as champions next season, level with cross-city rivals Panathinaikos. But while all of the attention is on those two Athens giants, some underdogs are flying under the radar as they prepare to mount their own assault on the summit.
Žalgiris Kaunas
Sylvain Francisco finished last season as the runner-up for EuroLeague MVP after leading Žalgiris to a domestic double and a genuine playoff scare against the defending champions — Kaunas pushed Fenerbahçe to four games, the deepest the club has gone in years — and then watched his own signing become a punchline.
He inked a three-year deal with ASVEL in July. Less than a month later, he was gone, bought out and shipped to Panathinaikos, his name attached to a rumor before the ink on his old contract had dried. That’s the sting nobody in Kaunas saw coming: not losing a player to a rival, but losing him to circumstances entirely outside their control, weeks after he’d been one of the best guards on the continent.
Žalgiris answered the only way they could, prying Jonas Valančiūnas out of the NBA at 34, hoping a two-time champion’s rim presence outweighs the mileage. It’s domestically that this club never blinks — not a single missed semifinal in its history, another LKL title and King Mindaugas Cup banner this year alone. Europe is the mountain that’s eluded them since the glory years, and this season hinges on whether a reshaped backcourt of Ty Lawson and Duane Washington Jr. can approximate what they just lost.
Red Star Belgrade
Ibon Navarro’s first walk into the Red Star gym came with seven trophies from four seasons at Unicaja trailing behind him and a very different kind of pressure waiting inside. This is a club with a European title dating to 1974, still measuring itself against a modern era it hasn’t cracked — a play-in exit to Barcelona last season, a Belgrade derby split with Partizan, another season of knocking without the door ever quite giving way.
Navarro inherits real talent: David Kramer and Nick Weiler-Babb in the backcourt, Johnathan Motley up front, Patrick Baldwin Jr., and a returning Nemanja Nedović. What he doesn’t inherit is patience. Belgrade has watched this roster-and-hope cycle before. Now, the Serbian capital demands results.
Baskonia
And then there’s Baskonia, who somehow won a trophy and had a nightmare season in the same year. An 0-6 start bled into a 13-25 finish, out of contention by April, the kind of collapse where you could feel the home crowd going quiet game by game. Then, almost defiantly, they went to Valencia in February and beat Real Madrid 100-89 to win the Copa del Rey, Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot pouring in 28 and Trent Forrest turning in a near triple-double that won him Final MVP.
Seventh cup in club history. First since 2009. And then the punchline: Luwawu-Cabarrot signed with Real Madrid, the exact team he’d just beaten. Forrest left for Fenerbahçe. The two engines of Baskonia‘s only good month are gone, replaced by Chris Duarte, DJ Stewart Jr., Markus Howard, and Kenneth Faried, under a Paolo Galbiati still trying to find out which version of his team shows up in October.
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