By Rigas Dardalis/ dardalis@eurohoops.net
In a season where everything turned upside down, with Olympiacos being on top of Greece and Europe for the first time in 15 years, the roles of its owners, Aggelopoulos brothers, were reversed. The usually talkative Panagiotis was laconic after the final: “I want to congratulate everybody. This success after 15 years is historic. We never thought that we will first conquer Euroleague and then Greece, but it’s sweet”.
And his brother, usually reserved Giorgos (photo), could not stop speaking: “The night is darkest just before the dawn. We had talk about it, we wrote it in one of our press releases and now it’s a new dawn, something that never happened before in European basketball. Coach Ivkovic said to us last summer that we were heroes because we endured many things in Greece, a whole system fighting us, but what followed after the summer gives an other perceptive to our success. It was a team that was considered by many as a failure, even before we started our effort. It’s easy to talk now, but you must have strength when you were down… I could say many things. The decision of CSKA Moscow‘s Siskauskas to retire was a shock to me and I know that it was a difficult decision, to step down when you are still able to play. In Barcelona’s football, team they lost two games in four days (ed. note: the league derby against Real and the Champions league semifinal) and now changed their coach. The pressure is impossible to bear for coaches, players and everybody else. We believed in this team, day by day, our goal was the championship and at some point we started to think that we could also win the Euroleague. What happened this season in our lockers never got out. You had learned nothing about those stuff. We worked things out like a family, we have to give credit to all our coaches, to our are players, our captain Vasilis Spanoulis and this trophy belongs to every fan of Olympiacos”.
Aggelopoulos brothers announced last summer that they would sell the team, something that didn’t happened and Giorgos explained why: “It was our final decision, we had tried everything, but we didn’t wanted to leave the team without a head. We decided to have a transitional season and week by week we created a competitive team. There wasn’t any serious interest from anyone about buying the team, but there have been a great investment from our part in the last years, with no fruition for reasons outside the court. So we decided to continue”.
Without speaking directly Giorgos Aggelopoulos referred to Panathinaikos who is being accused of having privileged relationship with the league and the basketball federation: “There is a whole system that is still fighting hard against us. We don’t know what the future will be”. There wasn’t any answer about the team plans for the future, with coach Dusan Ivkovic being a free agent, and as Panagiotis Aggelopoulos said: “Now we just live the moment. We will have a press conference in the near future about all those things”.