By Antonis Stroggylakis/ [email protected]
The two semifinal games at the upcoming 2025 Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Final Four held in Abu Dhabi will feature two matchups that we saw in the two previous editions of the tournament.
Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens and Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul get the Final Four underway in a rematch of last season’s semifinal. While Fener will be aiming to get some payback and advance to the championship game for the first time since 2018, the Greens are looking to repeat what happened last season and get one step closer towards winning back-to-back titles.
Not that they need any extra motivation but it’s certain that several AS Monaco players who were present at the 2023 Final Four haven’t forgotten the way they lost to Olympiacos Piraeus in that semifinal and will also be looking for vengeance.
“It seems inevitable that we’re always gonna meet them no matter what happens, so it’s almost like fate,” said Monaco superstar Mike James. “So, we gotta take care of business this time.”
On the other hand, Olympiacos is more than aware of that. After three straight trips to the Final Four but zero championships in that time, Giorgos Bartzokas and his players know that they must first overcome Monaco before attempting to finally bring the EuroLeague title back to Piraeus.
Eurohoops takes a look back at what happened in the last time we had these exact Final Four semifinal matchups and what decided each contest.
The first step toward the 7th star
Panathinaikos and Fenerbahce faced each other at a EuroLeague Final Four for the first time ever in the opener of the 2024 edition. While the Turkish team hadn’t been at this stage since 2019, the Greens had been waiting for 12 years.
On the back of a 12-0 start in almost four minutes, Panathinaikos quickly got the upper hand, forcing Fenerbahce to play catch up from early on. It took some time for Sarunas Jasikevicius’s players to make their reaction truly felt, when they outscored their opponents 4-13 in the last five minutes of the second period to close the first half down 38-36.
Panathinaikos kept hold of the lead, never allowing Fener to even tie the score, but the game had become a quite close affair. It would remain as such until Ergin Ataman brought perhaps an unlikely X-factor off the bench: Panagiotis Kalaitzakis.
Kalaitzakis, usually a tertiary option in the rotation, entered the game with Panathinaikos up 53-50, bringing heaps of energy and defensive grit on the floor. But that wasn’t all. He drained an important triple to put his team up by six near the end of the third quarter and then drained a pair of free throws that capped a 9-0 run for his team.
“I think he’s a future defensive player of the year, for sure,” Panathinaikos defensive specialist Jerian Grant said on Kalaitzakis after the game. “The way he guards and brings that energy off the bench.”
Fenerbahce was pushed completely out of its game as Panathinaikos established and preserved a double-digit advantage to ultimately cruise down the stretch for a 73-57 win. The Greek side had shut down its opponents 17-7 in the final period as it advanced to the championship game.
The ups and downs of the two teams:
The trio of Mathias Lessort (17 points, 10 rebounds), Kendrick Nunn (14 points) and Jerian Grant (13 points) carried Panathinaikos on offense without neglecting their duties on the other end of the court. While Kostas Sloukas had a subpar game for his standards with 4 points, he would more than make up with a masterpiece in the championship game to claim Final Four MVP honors.
As for Fener, Saras saw most of his stars not only struggle against the defense of Panathinaikos but also fail to hit open shots, finishing 9 for 35 from three-point land. Scottie Wilbekin, in particular, had a night to forget with 1-of-10 shooting from the field.
“I didn’t give what I normally give to the team. That hurts us a lot,” a candid Wilbekin said after the game.
Nigel Hayes-Davis led Fener with 14 points.
An outrageous and historic run
Monaco had swept Olympiacos in the 2022-23 regular season and was widely considered to be arguably the worst possible opponent for the Reds, especially from a physical standpoint.
For 20 minutes of the EuroLeague semifinal between the two teams, that proved to be the case. Sasa Obradovic’s players had held the top offensive team in the competition to just 29 points at halftime and were leading by 12.
Things would change quickly, though, and in a quite stunning and unprecedented fashion.
Olympiacos strengthened its defense on Mike James (who had 13 points at halftime) and began moving the ball much more fluidly to open the second half with a 14-0 run in less than four minutes. Monaco looked bamboozled, but that was just the start of their woes and its opponent’s feats.
After Elie Okobo scored a basket to tie the game, Olympiacos went on another spree of 13 unanswered points, capped by a tough buzzer-beating triple courtesy of Giannoulis Larentzakis.
That 27-2 run of Olympiacos made for a period to be remembered in the EuroLeague annals as perhaps arguably the most dominant quarter ever.
Monaco didn’t just have to erase a 56-43 deficit but it also had a mental mountain to climb after that third-quarter onslaught. That didn’t happen as Olympiacos possessed the quality, confidence and experience to close the game successfully with a 76-62 victory.
The ups and downs of the two teams:
While Sasha Vezenkov had 19 points and 6 rebounds, Kostas Papanikolaou delivered 15 points plus 8 boards and Moustapha Fall finished with 14 points and 4 assists, yet the Olympiacos player receiving the most praise by Sasa Obradovic was one who didn’t score at all.
“Real justice is when you see the player who scored zero points and dominated the game. There was a leader, he took the ball, took responsibility, put people on the spot. [He] destroyed everything defensively.”
Obradovic was clearly referring to Thomas Walkup, who had all 7 of his assists during Olympiacos’s 27-2 run and played tough, lockdown defense on the Monaco backcourt, dismantling the team’s stratagems.
For Monaco, James had 13 out of his 17 points in the first half, making 4-of-14 shots overall. Elie Okobo scored 17 on 5-of-13 shooting from the field.