The Greek coach led his team to its first-ever Championship Game participation
Monaco has laid the foundation for future success under Coach Spanoulis
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In his first season as a coach in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague, Vassilis Spanoulis did almost everything.
After clinching home-court advantage in the EuroLeague Playoffs, he led his team to Final Four qualification by eliminating FC Barcelona in a five-game series. In the semifinal against his former team, Spanoulis put together a master plan to disrupt Olympiacos Piraeus’s ball circulation, forced them to a season-low in assists and eliminated the regular-season leader from the competition.
Having remained unbeaten in the EuroLeague Semifinals as both a player and coach, Spanoulis came close to becoming the first-ever coach to have won the championship in his first season since Zeljko Obradovic did so with Partizan Belgrade in 1992.
But it wasn’t meant to be despite AS Monaco’s efforts in the Championship Game against Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul. Spanoulis’s side looked solid on defense but missed a spark on the other end in their bid to go all the way in their second-ever Final Four participation.
“Monaco could have won. They are a great team,” Fenerbahce head coach Saras Jasikevicius admitted after the game. “Their physicality is incredible, their guys left their hearts out there. Hats off to them.”
Having missed out on the trophy, Monaco is aware that there are a lot of positives to take from this season. As Spanoulis stressed in the post-game press conference, his team exceeded expectations this season, but they are yet to reach their full potential.
“We fought hard,” Spanoulis said. “For Monaco we broke the ceiling and [overcame] the expectations they had from us. We were just a bit away from the trophy. But this is life. You have to fight hard all your life to win trophies. Sometimes you win your first time, sometimes after two, five or ten times.”
Spanoulis joined the club in November and in just a few months he managed to transmit his ideals to the players, turning Monaco’s offense from iso-heavy into a ball-circulation machine, with star Mike James averaging a league fourth-best 5.8 assists per game and the team ending the season with a sixth-best 19.1 dishes.
The Greek coach has laid the foundation to achieve what no one else has managed at Monaco: go all the way to EuroLeague glory. Having led the team to Championship Game participation in his first season coaching in the competition, the future looks bright for Spanoulis’s Monaco.