By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Giorgos Bartzokas made history by winning back-to-back Turkish Airlines EuroLeague Coach of the Year Awards.
Per the press release: For the second year in a row, Georgios Bartzokas of Olympiacos Piraeus has been honored for leading the Reds to the Final Four by being voted the 2022-23 Alexander Gomelskiy Coach of the Year by his fellow Turkish Airlines EuroLeague head coaches.
Bartzokas steered his team to a first-place finish in the regular season with a 24-10 record. He then guided the Reds to their 12th Final Four appearance with a thrilling 3-2 playoff victory against Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul that made him the first coach in EuroLeague history to win four Game 5s.
Coach Bartzokas becomes the second person to win the Coach of the Year honor three times and the first to claim it in consecutive EuroLeague seasons. He had previously achieved this honor in 2012-13, his first season on the Olympiacos bench, after helping the Reds defend their EuroLeague title at the Final Four in London. Bartzokas was also chosen as Coach of the Year in the 2021-22 season, when he guided Olympiacos to its first Final Four appearance since 2017.
With a core of returning players, Olympiacos immediately found the right chemistry this season, opening with a four-game winning streak that included a sweep of road victories in Spain against FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and Cazoo Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz. Later, the Reds went on a seven-game winning streak in January and February, which allowed them to qualify for the playoffs first, in Round 29, with a road win at Zalgirio Arena, home of this season’s Final Four. Olympiacos won its last nine regular-season home games to secure crucial home-court advantage in the playoffs. If finished 4-0 against fellow Final Four teams Barca and Real, which were second and third, respectively, to finish atop the regular-season standings. Olympiacos also won both of its Greek derbies against archrival Panathinaikos Athens.
Once in the playoffs, Olympiacos took Game 1 against Fenerbahce but dropped Game 2 at home, ending a 10-game winning streak in front of its fans. Olympiacos bounced back with a Game 3 win in Istanbul thanks to a game-winning three-pointer by Kostas Sloukas at the buzzer. Then, with the series tied at 2-2 following a Fenerbahce win in Game 4, Bartzokas worked his magic in Game 5 by leading Olympiacos to an 84-72 victory that booked his team’s ticket to another Final Four.
Zeljko Obradovic of Partizan Mozzart Bet Belgrade was second in the voting, followed by Kazys Maksvytis of Zalgiris Kaunas. Other coaches receiving votes were Oded Kattash of Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv, Sarunas Jasikevicius of Barcelona, Sasa Obradovic of AS Monaco, Joan Penarroya of Baskonia, Chus Mateo of Real and Dimitris Itoudis of Fenerbahce.
Sharing the ball and playing strong defense, pillars of Bartzokas’s system, have been crucial to Olympiacos’s success. No team in EuroLeague history has dished as many assists as the Reds – 817 and counting – and their per-game rate of 20.9 is the second-highest average all-time. All those assists mean that, with two Final Four games left to play, they are on the verge of another record, for two-point efficiency. Their 60.1% success rate on two-point shot attempts currently sits above the standing record of 59.2% for Real’s team way back in the 2001-02 season. On defense, Olympiacos leads the league with 7.5 steals per game while holding its opponents to the lowest average PIR of any team, 77.4 per game. Its own per-game PIR of 100.9 ranks second this season.
After retiring as a player at age 27 due to knee injuries, Bartzokas soon began coaching smaller clubs Pefki, Eraklio, Vrilissia and Kifissia before assisting Greek legend Panagiotis Giannakis and coaching Vassilis Spanoulis at Maroussi. Larissa made him a first-time head coach in the Greek League for three seasons, then he returned to Maroussi as the team’s lead coach and made his EuroLeague debut in 2009-10 by taking the team from the qualification round to the Top 16, just missing the playoffs. After a stop at Panionios, Olympiacos appointed him to replace the late Dusan Ivkovic in the summer after the team won the 2012 EuroLeague title. Bartzokas and the Reds defended the trophy at the 2013 Final Four in London, making Olympiacos – until Anadolu Efes Istanbul’s successive titles in 2021 and 2022 – just the second team to become back-to-back champion this century, following Maccabi Tel Aviv’s successes in 2004 and 2005.
From Olympiacos, Bartzokas went to Lokomotiv Kuban and turned the team into a surprise 2016 Final Four participant. He coached the team that Lokomotiv beat in the playoffs, FC Barcelona, the following year before taking Khimki Moscow Region to its first and only playoff appearance in 2017-18. He returned to Olympiacos midway through the 2019-20 season and has steadily built the Reds back into the contender they are today, ending the team’s five-year playoff drought last season and following up on the 2022 run to the Final Four by achieving that same accomplishment in 2023. Now, Bartzokas hopes to win his second EuroLeague title with Olympiacos, just as the late great Dusan Ivkovic did with the Reds in 1997 and 2012.