Baskonia Open EuroLeague at Piraeus: Kobi Simmons and the Seventh Opening Night Against Olympiacos

Kobi Simmons used a heavy word for Olympiacos: “the champions.” He dropped it mid-sentence, flat in tone, as if everyone in Vitoria already knew.

I read the quote three times. Not because it was hard to follow, but because of the way a 29-year-old in his second EuroLeague season chose to talk about his first opponent of the year. “It will be a big test for us to play the champions in the opener.” That one sentence carries three layers: a roster that is almost new, a road trip to Piraeus, and an assessment of an opponent offered by someone who will actually stand on the floor.

He added: “I think we are ready. We have had good practices recently.” I have heard that line hundreds of times before opening nights, in every league and every sport. It is almost never wrong, and almost never right in the way people expect.

In Vitoria, they know what a road game in Piraeus feels like. In Piraeus, they know it too.

This is the seventh time in the modern EuroLeague era that Olympiacos and Baskonia have been matched on opening night. Olympiacos won all six previous meetings. The repetition has hardened into a scheduling habit: the Greek heavyweight starts its European season with a home win, and Baskonia starts with a trip everyone already knows is hard.

The two clubs are opposites in almost everything off the floor. Olympiacos is one of the biggest budgets in Europe, playing at the Peace and Friendship Stadium in Piraeus, where nearly twelve thousand people can turn the third quarter into physical pressure. Baskonia comes from the Basque Country, plays at the roughly fifteen-thousand-seat Buesa Arena, and is known more for developing and selling players than for buying stars. Their roster turns over almost annually. In Vitoria, every summer is a rebuild, and October is always a month of relearning.

Simmons enters his second EuroLeague season with a steady profile: 11.1 points, 3 assists, 1.3 rebounds, 0.7 steals, 0.1 blocks and 1.5 turnovers in 22:10 per game across 31 games last season. At 29, he is past the experiment stage. He is the guard a staff puts on the floor when the game needs a brain to hold the tempo.

I prefer reading those numbers as ratios rather than absolute values. Three assists against 1.5 turnovers is a 2:1 mark, unspectacular but clean enough to handle the ball in the EuroLeague, where every sideways pass is read a beat early by the defense. The 0.1 blocks per game describes his size and his job: a small guard who survives on wingspan and on staying in front of his man rather than leaving the play for a highlight. The 1.3 rebounds tells the same story, that he is asked to sprint back and protect the rim rather than crash the paint.

Then comes the hardest part of the interview: “We have players who are rookies in the EuroLeague and are trying to adapt.” Technically accurate, and also a polite way of naming a very specific problem. The EuroLeague differs from the NBA G League and from other European competitions in three ways: game density, referee whistles, and the quality of opponent scouting. New players usually need eight to twelve rounds to understand that in Europe, space does not open by itself; it is created by off-ball movement and by a pass delivered on time.

During preseason, Baskonia played friendlies in arenas that were nearly empty, where sneakers and coaches echoed louder than any crowd. An empty arena, and yet the tactics have never spoken more clearly. What they assembled there will face an entirely different test in Piraeus.

Tactically, Baskonia’s problem sits at both ends of the floor, not in the middle. Under Georgios Bartzokas, Olympiacos runs a pick-and-roll defense in which the point-of-attack guard, typically Thomas Walkup, tries to push the ball out of the primary handler’s hands, while centers Moustapha Fall and Nikola Milutinov protect the rim by dropping deep and conceding mid-range shots. Sasha Vezenkov and Evan Fournier on the wings create a separate issue: they move constantly without the ball, and every time a Baskonia guard turns his head toward the ball, he loses his man.

Beating that coverage usually requires three things. A guard good enough at pull-ups off the screen to force the big man up a step, and Simmons has the mid-range for it. A roller who reads contact angles instead of running into the center’s chest. And a shooting line ready for the kick-out. None of that demands superhuman talent. It demands a team that has played together long enough to react in half a second. In Round 1 of October, that half second is almost always missing.

There is one genuine advantage for the underdog in Piraeus: nobody expects Baskonia to score 90. The game will most likely be slow, low-scoring, and decided by two numbers few viewers track, the turnovers Baskonia commits in the opponent’s half and the transition threes they concede to Olympiacos.

“We surprised some teams last season.” That is the most interesting line in the interview, and the easiest to misread. Based on what I recorded while watching Baskonia’s games last season, they won the nights they shot above 40 percent from three and lost the nights that number fell under 30. The surprise had a fairly clear equation: a new roster, fast pace, volume shooting, and opponents without enough film to prepare. Once the league had watched the tape, the surprise disappeared and what remained was the real quality of the roster.

Olympiacos’ 6-0 opening-night record against Baskonia is real data, but it carries almost no predictive weight for this October. European basketball has no curses; it has schedules. Olympiacos opens at home, keeps its core, and enters the season with a system already running. Baskonia does the opposite. That is essentially the whole story, and it has not changed in seven years.

The idea that an opener says something about a whole season is fundamentally wrong. Round 1 in October is an unfinished build of the EuroLeague. People remember openers because they are first, not because they predict well.

And this is the point I want to stress most: a new roster in the EuroLeague does not get weaker because it lacks talent, but because it lacks data about itself. Baskonia needs to know which of their guards can be attacked in transition defense, at what pace their shooters still have legs, and who holds the ball in the final four minutes. Piraeus is the most expensive place to collect that data. For a new team, October is tuition; March is the semester.

I once called a derby in noise so loud I could not hear my own voice, and the lesson has stayed with me. That derby, I lost my voice in the noise — and found myself in the silence. The SEF on opening night runs the same way on opposing players: the crowd does not make them miss, it makes them shoot half a beat faster.

Simmons said one thing I believe: “We will come out with energy.” Energy is all Baskonia can promise before a game like this, and the only thing they control. But energy does not pay the bills in the paint, where Fall and Milutinov wait, and where every pass has a price.

A good broadcaster is not the one with the answers, but the one who knows where the story is going. For Baskonia, this season’s story does not begin in Piraeus. It begins around Round 10, once their young players know the names and the rhythm of the league.

From track and field to esports, every athlete runs toward the same finish line: the moment of being themselves. Baskonia will not find that moment in an opener against the champions. But if they protect the ball, hold their tempo and stay calm in the last four minutes of the fourth quarter, they will know exactly where they stand — and know it earlier than anyone else.