Baskonia 89-106 Olympiacos: When the Three-Point Rain Dried Up and the Champion's Hidden Defensive Leak

Minute six. The score 22-15. I was sitting in front of a screen in Miami, coffee long cold, already calculating whether I should just shut the laptop and go to bed early. Baskonia had just hit six consecutive three-pointers without a single miss. Tadas Sedekerskis raised his arms after every make, the arena roared, and that familiar feeling of a wild game about to happen kept me in my chair a few minutes longer.

Those few minutes saved me from missing a serious lesson.

Baskonia's opening six threes were a fever, not a system. And every fever breaks.

Context: the champion and the familiar guest

Olympiacos opened the EuroLeague season as defending champion. It was their seventh straight opening-night win, and Greek media had already turned the number into folklore: every beginning brings Baskonia and a victory. It sounds good, but I have never trusted stories woven from seven games scattered across different years, different rosters, different coaches.

Head coach Giorgos Bartzokas brought to Spain a rotation uncomfortably deep. Sasha Vezenkov, Tyler Dorsey, Jean Montero, Evan Fournier, Tyrique Jones — five names that can score, five different ways to attack, five separate problems for any defense. Baskonia, on the other side, is a mid-tier club that lives on long-range shooting, and this was exactly the kind of game they could steal if the shot went in.

And the shot went in. For six minutes.

Core: 6/6 into 2/12 — the math always collects

Split the data by half and you get a simple, frightening equation. Baskonia finished the first half 8/18 from beyond the arc. Subtract the 6/6 start, and they shot 2/12 the rest of the half. That is not a mental collapse. That is arithmetic returning to its rightful place.

This is the core insight: Baskonia did not lose because they went cold — they lost because they had no Plan B inside the paint.

The three-point rain came from nowhere. It did not come from a sequence of possessions that bent the defense. It came from difficult shots a team cannot reproduce every night. And when those shots stopped falling, Baskonia had nothing left to hold the game with. No post touch. No forward who could attack the rim. No big man forcing Olympiacos to double.

On the other side, Olympiacos played a fundamentally different brand of basketball. They did not need defense to win the opening quarter. They chose to trade baskets and let the numbers speak about their depth. By halftime they led by ten, and that gap was never closed again.

Jean Montero — spelled Gian Montero in some reports — was the pivot of that shift. He scored eight of a ten-point run and added four assists. A guard who scores and creates forces the defense into a choice: double or don't double. Baskonia chose wrong, and Montero punished them both ways.

Based on my experience tracking EuroLeague games, this is the guard archetype defenses fear most: not a pure shooter, but a player who reads how the defense moves before the pass leaves his hand. Montero plays a beat ahead. He does not steal the ball; he steals intent.

And the way Olympiacos closed the game matters. They did not explode in one quarter. They expanded the lead monotonically: ten at midgame, twenty at minute 29, twenty-three at minute 37. A straight upward line, no spikes, no dips. In basketball, that is the signature of a team controlling a game, not a team getting lucky.

Data: two 22-point scorers and an anonymous bench

Tyler Dorsey scored ten points in eight minutes. He finished the third quarter with 22 points on 4/5 from two, 4/6 from three and 2/2 at the line. His True Shooting percentage sat near 93%. Sasha Vezenkov also had 22, but by an entirely different road: 8/9 from two, 0/1 from three, 6/6 from the line. His TS% was roughly 87%.

Those two numbers, from two different horizons, tell the same story. Vezenkov did not need the three to hurt Baskonia. He attacked the paint — the exact area Baskonia had left open by building its defensive thinking around closing the arc.

Baskonia prepared to stop the rain and forgot the river. Vezenkov was the river.

Notice a small but telling detail: Vezenkov attempted one three all night. A two-meter forward did not stretch the floor; he used six free throws and eight close shots to reach 22. That means Baskonia's defense had already lost before its own shooting cooled. It defended by predicting one script, and Olympiacos had read that script first.

Tyrique Jones is the name the box score never fully tells. He mattered from the first minute, in the way commentators describe interior players doing the dirty work no highlight reel captures. Evan Fournier added a tidy seven off the bench, 2/2 from two and 1/2 from three. No glamour, no wasted possessions.

Olympiacos finished with five players in double figures. Five. That is the mark of a team you cannot neutralize by locking down one name.

The contrarian angle: the champion did not defend, and that is the real concern

Here I have to say what Olympiacos writers may not want to hear.

The champion won with offense, not defense. In the opening quarter, while Baskonia was hot, Olympiacos fell behind 22-15. They compensated for defensive weaknesses through offense — a perfectly reasonable road-game approach, but also a red flag. A defending champion should not need twenty-plus points a quarter to cover its own leaks.

What happens when the opponent is not Baskonia but a Final Four semifinalist that both shoots well and defends? What happens when you cannot trade baskets because the other side also scores twenty-two a quarter and has no intention of cooling down after six minutes?

The champion-and-customer narrative is good television. It hides the more important observation: Olympiacos won on roster depth, not on a defensive system. And in basketball, roster depth depends on budget more than on tactics.

The recent transfer window gives us a clearer filter. Olympiacos built a roster with at least five independent scoring sources — something only clubs in the EuroLeague's top budget tier can do. Baskonia, on a mid-tier budget, took the opposite road: cheaper shooters, efficient contracts, and a style built on variance.

That talent gap was not decided in forty minutes in Spain. It was decided in an office in June, when contracts were signed and ledgers were balanced. A box score never shows you this, which is why I always read transfer news before game news.

But I could be wrong. If Olympiacos's defense simply started slow, and Bartzokas pulled his core scorers at minutes 29 and 33 to preserve them for a long season, there is nothing to worry about. Pulling Vezenkov and Dorsey with a twenty-point lead is a champion's decision — saving energy for bigger nights. That is workload management, not weakness.

But if the early concessions are systemic rather than lucky, a Final Four-caliber opponent will punch first and finish what Baskonia started. And no three-pointer will save anyone then.

About seven for seven

One paragraph for the line the media keeps repeating: seven opening nights, seven wins, always Baskonia. It sounds like a law. It is seven games, one per season, spread across years. The sample is too small to call it structure. It is coincidence, inflated into legend.

Believing in tiny numbers is how we fool ourselves every new season. I have done it myself.

In 2026, sitting in the stands at Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta, I watched Atlanta United dismantle the New York Red Bulls 3-1 and immediately tweeted that this all-out attack would collapse against a packed defense. That team made the playoffs and lost in the first round, and I thought I was right. I was wrong about the reason. I spent a month rewatching five of their matches, from passing patterns to Josef Martinez's runs, to learn that a hot take needs evidence behind it.

Numbers are only a map; feeling is the real pitch. But feeling without a map will get you lost. And seven opening games are not a map. They are a dot on the page.

A technical footnote few notice

The EuroLeague arc sits at roughly 6.75 meters, closer than the NBA's 7.24. That sounds trivial, but it changes how we read every shooting-efficiency number. A 40% three-point shooter in Europe is not the same as a 40% shooter in the US. The shorter line means higher expected conversion, more space, and — most importantly — no defensive three-second rule, letting defenders camp in the paint far longer. Carry a EuroLeague TS% into an NBA comparison without adjusting and you are comparing different physical realities.

With Vezenkov this matters more. He shot 8/9 inside the arc. In a game where defenders can legally linger in the key, near-perfect close-range finishing is not ordinary skill. It is dominance.

What to watch

Olympiacos reached a twenty-three-point margin at minute 37 before easing off. But remember: this is one game. This is Round 1. Every conclusion drawn from a single game is provisional, and the worst habit we have is forgetting that after a pretty win.

What I want to track over the next four to six rounds is not how many points Olympiacos scores, but how many they concede in the first quarter. If the Baskonia leak was a one-off, it is noise. If it repeats, it is a system. And a weak defensive system does not survive a knockout tournament where one bad night ends a season.

For Baskonia the question is sharper. They need a scoring source inside the arc — a forward who can attack the rim, a big who demands the ball on the block. If they keep living on the arc, every night is a gamble, and every gamble eventually loses. Variance is not a tactic. It is a deferred defeat.

For Vezenkov and Dorsey, brace for cooling. 87% and 93% TS% are not averages. They are the peak of a single game, possibly of a season. They will settle near 60%, and that is entirely normal. Do not read one game as a whole season. I have watched too many people do it, and I was once one of them.

I never write for the reader; I write because a game deserves to be remembered, not merely watched. This one deserves remembering for two reasons: it showed that roster depth can substitute for defense on an ordinary night, and it showed that variance can create the illusion of an upset for six minutes.

The question is not whether Olympiacos is a real champion. The question is: when an opponent's three-point rain falls on a Final Four semifinal night, does the champion have the defense to stand, or will it be forced into a race it does not control?

I do not know the answer. But I will watch every game to find it. And I will not shut the laptop after six minutes again.