By Fanis Panagiotou/ info@eurohoops.net
Vassilis Spanoulis is having an excellent season on the courts of the EuroLeague and his stats clearly show that he’s like good old wine!
Olympiacos’s leader contributes to his team more than any other year and with everything he’s doing against the top teams in Europe, he’s making everyone forget the fact that he’s now 34 years old. Check out on Eurohoops the infographic that shows that this year “Kill Bill” is contributing at least 30 points per game to the red-and-whites. More than any other season in Piraeus.
“All day, every day I sit and I think about basketball and how I can become better in order to help my team,” says Spanoulis. We weren’t expecting anything less from the man who changed the modern history of Olympiacos. Everyone knows how hard-working he is. He couldn’t have been any other way. You don’t get to the top just with talent. Spanoulis worked hard and has achieved a lot of great things in his career so far. He’s done things on the court that are going to be remembered for years. He recently became the only player in the history of the EuroLeague with more than 3000 points, over 1000 assists, and a ranking of 3000.
So much has been written about Spanoulis. And not without reason, since we’re talking about one of the best in the history of European basketball. What’s impressing is that Olympiacos’s leader never ceases to amaze us. The logical progression of things would be for Spanoulis’s numbers to be worse with every year that goes by. And yet. In the toughest and most demanding EuroLeague of all time, “Kill Bill” contributes to his team more than at any other time.
And we’re not referring to points exclusively. It’s the combination of points and assists that draws the above conclusion. More specifically, this year Spanoulis scores 15.6 points and dishes 7.5 assists. If we take the worst-case scenario, which is that the assists result in two-point baskets, then we come to the overall figure of 30.6 points from the 80.1 that Olympiacos scores in total. In the 2011-12 season, Spanoulis scored 16.7 points per game. A better performance, but with the addition of 4 assists on average, the total comes out lower than this year’s.
Someone might say that it’s still early. They wouldn’t be wrong, but at the same time we shouldn’t forget that in this year’s EuroLeague the strong games start from the very first week, and so all 8 games are available for drawing conclusions. Check out more in the following infographic.
CLARIFICATION: The table has counted the assists as two-point baskets. Click on the arrow that you will see where the season is mentioned and the rest of Spanoulis’s years with the red-and-whites will open. The red portion of the pie is the points and assists contributed by “Kill Bill” to the total of Olympiacos.