Olympiacos, Red Star's 70% and Bartzokas' Admission

Red Star Belgrade shot 70% on two-pointers and 60% on three-pointers for a large part of the game. Those are not the numbers of a serious basketball game. They are the numbers of a shooting practice with no one defending. When a team hits that percentage over a sustained stretch, the problem is rarely in the shooter's wrist — it is in the air in front of the shooter. At the Neofytos Chandriotis friendly tournament in Cyprus, Giorgos Bartzokas' Olympiacos let their opponent do exactly that. And the most telling thing was not the final score, but how the Greek coach described it after the buzzer: "We are not ready, we are running for team level." To understand why those numbers should worry more than the friendly scoreline suggests, you have to place them in the right season context. This is pre-season, the window where Bartzokas himself insists the official games — starting with the EuroLeague Super Cup — are the true measure. Olympiacos entered this window as a EuroLeague title contender, but in a state of reassembly: Sasha Vezenkov returning, plus a wave of new perimeter signings including Codi Miller-McIntyre, Jean Montero, and a third name reported vaguely. Bartzokas revealed one notable operational detail: some players had trained together only two or three times. This is the roster with the most internationals in the EuroLeague — ten of them. Such a squad converging late is a structural feature of the European calendar, not a failure unique to Olympiacos. What I want to isolate here is how Bartzokas described the defensive failure. He did not talk about the system. He talked about cooperation. He listed: sluggish defense, no ball pressure, poor cooperation, poor focus, poor intensity, hands not on the ball. String that together and you get a textbook description of what analysts call a collapse of the point of attack. When the perimeter fails to contain the ball-handler from the start, the ball-handler gains full-court vision. When he has vision, passes travel without obstruction. When passes travel without obstruction, shooters stand completely open. And when shooters stand open, the whole team's confidence snowballs possession by possession. This is a domino effect, not a single symptom. The phrase "hands not on the ball" is especially telling. It is a purely European coaching cue, implying the team was neither cutting passing lanes nor disrupting the dribble rhythm nor digging at the ball at mid-court. In other words, they neither pressured the handler nor threatened the cuts. Under FIBA rules — no defensive three seconds, a shorter three-point arc — ball pressure and off-ball spacing carry entirely different weight than in the NBA. A defense that loses its point of attack in Europe gets punished faster, because opponents have more room to exploit inside the paint. Bartzokas also mentioned "offensive cooperation," paired with defensive cooperation. He called it a problem at both ends. That fits a roster that has not played together long enough. With ten internationals from different basketball cultures — American, Spanish, various Balkan schools — convergence takes longer not just because of fitness, but because of tactical language. Each basketball culture teaches a different way to defend the pick-and-roll. Mix them together and the misalignment appears in moments where no one makes an obvious mistake, yet the defense still breaks. Here I want to stop on a number I do not trust. The report states Olympiacos "needed a better defensive effort in the fourth quarter, where they conceded 11 points." Conceding only 11 points in a quarter is excellent defense, not poor defense. The figure contradicts itself. It is most likely a translation or transcription issue: perhaps 11 points in a decisive stretch, or 11 points from offensive rebounds. Whatever it is, I will not use it as evidence. In my line of work, some numbers you see and immediately understand are unreliable. This is one of them. The more trustworthy data lies in the late-game rebounds. Olympiacos let Red Star grab three offensive boards on the final possession. This is the classic failure pattern of a "friendly we nearly lost but should never have lost." Late-game rebounding discipline collapsed, not half-court defense. That is a focus and positioning error, not a scheme error. On Vezenkov, I note a soft paradox. Bartzokas said he did not play well, yet called him "decisive" for an and-one and a transition three. This is the "bad shooting night but still cold at the decisive moment" descriptor — a typical sign of a star reintegrating. Three confounding variables must sit alongside it: this was his first game with teammates, he had trained with the full squad for about one and a half sessions, and he was carrying a hand injury. For a player whose core value is shooting, a hand injury is a variable to watch, even if minor. Tyler Dorsey was absent, but not through injury — he was rested for load management and will return against Maccabi Tel Aviv. That is a positive signal: the coaching staff is actively managing veteran minutes even in pre-season. In a basketball world where intensity stretches from September to May under a dense calendar, this is not laziness — it is a plan. When Bartzokas was asked directly about Miller-McIntyre, Montero, and the third newcomer, he did not confirm they were ready. He said "all players are justified, but they must improve quickly," and pivoted to fitness variance. To me, this is the classic integration-phase answer: buying time for the new signings while signalling urgency. The three new perimeter players are exactly the men expected to anchor the defensive point of attack — precisely the area Bartzokas' criticism was aimed at. Now comes the part most viewers will misread. They will see 70% and 60% and conclude Red Star is a terrifying shooting team. It is not. Those percentages are not sustainable in any league, including college basketball. You cannot shoot 70% on twos for a whole season. That number measures the quality of space Olympiacos exposed, not the quality of Red Star. Correlation is not causation. Read 70% as a capability index for Red Star and you build a wrong expectation for both teams. I often remind myself: numbers do not lie, but they cannot tell a story either. A friendly in Cyprus, measured by the log file, has value only at the signal level — never at the conclusion level. And the signal here is clear: Olympiacos is not yet Olympiacos. Bartzokas said so himself, and he generalized further: "no team is ready," this is the reality for the teams. But every coach talks about feel. I have no feel, I have standard deviation. I have ten internationals, two or three shared trainings, a returning shooter with a sore hand, and a perimeter defense that has not found its positioning. What will define Olympiacos' season is not a win or loss in the Super Cup. It is the speed at which they rebuild their defensive point of attack, and whether Vezenkov can stay healthy into November. Data is a monastery: the less noise, the clearer you hear something trying to speak. For Olympiacos right now, the noise is the scoreboard. What is trying to speak is a defense that has not yet found itself. As for the numbers the report left behind — 70%, 60%, 11 fourth-quarter points — treat them as pieces requiring verification, not truths nailed down. Because if there is one thing I have learned in thirteen years sitting between data and the court, it is this: most wrong conclusions about basketball are built from correct numbers placed in the wrong spot.