Evan Fournier played a key role Thursday with a season-high 28 points in Madrid
Serious Olympiacos breaking away from pack in top-four race
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Something had to give when Real Madrid hosted Olympiacos Piraeus in a true heavyweight matchup on Thursday night, repeating both last season’s semifinal and the previous year’s championship game.
Both teams were in red-hot form heading into the showdown, with Real having won all six games since sinking to a worrying home defeat against Zalgiris Kaunas in mid-December, neatly turning crisis into opportunity.
Olympiacos, meanwhile, had established a two-game lead at the top of the standings with its own six-game streak, again getting its competitive juices flowing with an overtime win at Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz just two days earlier.
Irresistible force versus immovable object? With these two talent-loaded rosters it’s difficult to decide which team fits which of those descriptions, so the outcome of Thursday’s Rivalry Series showdown was really anyone’s guess.
And few people could have predicted that Olympiacos would enjoy such a comfortable victory, rolling to an 86-96 scoreline with a dominant performance at both ends of the floor which delivered a 22-point lead early in the fourth quarter.
Although Real did show some spirit to launch a late 10-0 run and nearly set up a big finale, the host couldn’t get closer than 8 points and Olympiacos will reflect on a very well-deserved victory after leading for the last 34 minutes.
There were key individual contributions, notably from shooting star Evan Fournier who netted 5 triples in his career-high total of 28 points. Nikola Milutinov also won his battle in the paint with Walter Tavares by blasting a couple of ferocious dunks in his 13 points and adding 8 rebounds, while Luca Vildoza – on the night he reached 1,500 points in the competition and dished a game-high 5 assists – did a great defensive job to limit Real dynamo Facu Campazzo to just 7 points.
More than those solo stats, however, this was a highly serious and focused performance from Olympiacos, leading Fournier to conclude: “We came in with the mentality of the underdog. Madrid is playing really well and they have a really good defense, so it’s tough to play against them. When we have that spirit, that mindset and that fight, that’s when we play our best.”
It was the second win this season for Olympiacos over its Spanish rival, having triumphed 79-69 in October behind 23 points from Sasha Vezenkov, so Coach Georgios Bartzokas’s team now boasts the potential head-to-head tiebreak advantage over Real as well as a four-game lead.
With 12 games still remaining in the regular season, that is far from decisive, but it puts Olympiacos in a great position to overcome one of its chief rivals for a top-four finish – which historically provides a 75% chance of advancing to the Final Four.
Coach Bartzokas certainly isn’t thinking that far ahead, but allied with Fournier in praising the mental fortitude of his players as he concluded: “I really appreciate the effort of the players. We have players with personality – players that play to do their job, not just to play naïve basketball. We need to play to win games, and we have these players.”
Winning games is something that Olympiacos is doing with impressive consistency right now. And if the same serious attitude is maintained until the end of May, the Reds could well end up winning it all.