By Eurohoops Team/ info@eurohoops.net
While most of the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague’s usual suspects delivered what was expected of them in the playoffs, there were some other – perhaps unheralded – players who stepped up big time to raise the level of their game and make a decisive impact in the most crucial moment of the season before the Final Four.
Eurohoops gives its flowers to five guys who left their mark in the playoffs and helped their teams advance to the Final Four.
Cedi Osman (Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens)
Before the EuroLeague Playoffs, Cedi Osman was averaging 7.9 points and 2.4 rebounds in the regular season of his maiden campaign with Panathinaikos.
In the quarterfinals against his former team Anadolu Efes Istanbul, Osman catapulted his numbers to 17.2 points and 4.0 rebounds, emerging as the leading scorer of Panathinaikos in the series.
While Efes was locked in on neutralizing season MVP Kendrick Nunn, who largely struggled against the highly physical and well-planned defense of the Turkish team, Osman found the room to unfold his offensive skills and do damage as both a slashing force and a sniper from distance.
Osman showed the sharpness of his teeth in Game 4 where he produced 22 points – his season high until then – amid heavy booing by the Efes crowd. Panathinaikos didn’t manage to finish the job in Istanbul as the series returned to OAKA.
In Game 5, Osman was the generator behind Panathinaikos’s nuclear start. He scored 17 points in the first 14 minutes as the Greens went on to grab a 36-13 lead halfway through the second period for a cushion that proved to be of crucial importance. When Efes tried to complete its comeback down the stretch, he had seven points in the last six minutes to push his team to the win and guarantee a spot at the 2025 Final Four.
Osman’s final tally of 28 points and 8 rebounds marked the best performance of his EuroLeague career. It was only natural to hear his name being chanted by the Panathinaikos crowd as he joined their songs in perfect Greek.
Dinos Mitoglou (Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens)
“Mitoglou in this kind of the game needs to give more. Players like Mitoglou need to give more. I hope he wakes up,” Panathinaikos coach Ergin Ataman said in the press conference after his team’s win in Game 1.
I don’t know if Ataman’s challenge was indeed the wake-up call that Mitoglou needed, but the Greek forward responded to his coach and then some.
Following the Game 2 loss that tied the series for Efes, Panathinaikos needed someone to step up and help the team reclaim the home-court advantage. Someone that the Turkish side maybe underestimated and didn’t pay much attention to.
Mitoglou delivered with a season high-tying 18 points and 6 rebounds as Panathinaikos took the Game 3 win to swing the series in its favor. He went off from beyond the arc to punish the Efes defense with 4-of-5 triples, including the dagger to make it 74-79 with six seconds remaining.
Kendrick Nunn had his best game in the playoffs in this win with 25 points, 5 rebounds and 4 assists. Still, Panathinaikos wouldn’t have grabbed this huge result if not for Mitoglou doing some heavy lifting of his own.
Georgios Papagiannis (AS Monaco)
If there was a poll among fans regarding which player would make the difference in Game 5 of the series between AS Monaco and Barcelona, it wouldn’t be odd if Georgios Papagiannis finished last.
Coming into Game 5, Papagiannis hadn’t appeared in any game since Round 29, when he played just 3:53 minutes in a road loss at Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv. He wasn’t even registered on the 12-man squad for the first four games of the quarterfinals as his team returned home with the series tied at 2-2 after two losses in Catalonia.
Vassilis Spanoulis included Papagiannis on the roster for Game 5 and his decision proved to be pivotal. The big man stepped on the court with Monaco down 20-24 early in the second period, quickly hitting a triple and scoring seven points to push his team toward going up 45-39 at halftime.
The best was yet to come.
In the fourth quarter and with the game on the line, Papagiannis scored 10 points in less than six minutes to provide Monaco a massive boost en route to the victory and a place at the Final Four.
With 17 points (on 7-of-8 shooting, including 3-of-3 triples), Papagiannis became an unlikely hero for Monaco. While the Greek center has had more productive nights in the EuroLeague, this was arguably the best game of his career so far given what was at stake.
Tarik Biberovic (Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul)
How good was Tarik Biberovic in the playoffs? So good that comparisons were made even with Fenerbahce legend Bogdan Bogdanovic.
Biberovic was unleashed in the series against Paris Basketball with a team-high 17.3 points on stellar shooting, having gone 8 for 12 on two-pointers and 11 for 19 on threes. He led Fener in scoring in both Game 2 and Game 3 with 20 and 21 points, respectively, destroying the opposing defense with 5-of-7 triples during the latter.
In an intense Game 3 that went to overtime, the 24-year-old swingman made sure that there won’t be any more drama, dropping seven straight points at the beginning of the extra period.
Fener got to the Final Four with a 3-0 sweep against the highly competitive Paris, with a new sharpshooting star in Biberovic leading the way.
Kostas Papanikolaou (Olympiacos Piraeus)
In the 2024-25 regular season, Olympiacos captain Kostas Papanikolaou had scored in double figures in just three games. He never had more than 13 points (in a home win over EA7 Emporio Armani Milan), and most of the time he didn’t need to score heavily since his team has lots of talent to take care of the bucket-getting business.
Papanikolaou was also quiet in the first three contests of the series against Real Madrid and the first 25 minutes of Game 4. He then made his first basket, a three-pointer to give the Reds a 51-58 edge before entering vintage mode in the fourth quarter.
On Olympiacos’s first possession of the final frame, Papanikolaou drained a triple, added a second one a couple of minutes later and then fired another downtown missile – while drawing a foul on Dzanan Musa – as the lead swelled to 67-82.
This 15-point lead courtesy also of Papanikolaou’s three-point rampage proved to be vital for Olympiacos, which pushed back a brave Real Madrid comeback to get the win and secure its trip to Abu Dhabi.