By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Panathinaikos president and General Manager Manos Papadopoulos said that Olympiacos wouldn’t win any EuroLeague titles if not for a former star of the “Greens”: Vassilis Spanoulis.
Spanoulis signed with Olympiacos in 2010 as a free agent, after leaving Panathinaikos. Olympiacos‘ archrival club.
Olympiacos won the 2012 and 2013 EuroLeague with Spanoulis on board, plus the 2012, 2015, 2016 Greek championship titles and the 2010 Greek Cup. The team hadn’t won a EuroLeague or Greek League title since 1997.
Papadopoulos also mentioned that if Lithuanian forward Ramunas Siskauskas didn’t leave the team in 2007 to sign with CSKA Moscow, then the “Greens” would win the EuroLeague for two straight seasons. The “Greens” won the 2009 EuroLeague by beating Siskauskas’ CSKA in the Final.
Here’s what Papadopoulos said in an interview with Greek website SDNA:
– Which player did you lose these last years and you consider it a mistake? Either someone who left due to bad handling or someone who didn’t come to the team.
For me, the mistake was with two players. One of them was [Ramunas] Siskauskas. I believe that if he stayed with Panathinaikos we would win three more EuroLeague titles in a row. But he was replaced by Saras who’s one of the greatest players of all times in Europe. And the team became of a different type. The other one is clearly Spanoulis who went to Olympiacos. If he hadn’t gone to Olympiacos, then Olympiacos wouldn’t have won any EuroLeague title and I’m sure of this, even if they put 100 million a year.
– So, was it a mistake also from Panathinaikos side? The way the club handled it?
It was a mistake that he left. You can’t know where is the mistake with the handlings and where it isn’t. I can’t say more about this transfer. Perhaps I’ll be able to speak more when Spanoulis will have retired from basketball.