By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
A revolutionary player who became the first full-time reserve to be voted MVP of the Euroleague, point guard Theo Papaloukas won continental titles in 2006 and 2008 with CSKA Moscow. He shares records for having appeared in a record nine total and eight consecutive Final Fours. He also has the second-most assists and steals this century in his 12-season Euroleague career. Papaloukas was the 2006 Final Four MVP, as CSKA won its first title in 35 years, and the 2007 full-season MVP, as well. He was voted to the All-Euroleague team four times and was one of 10 players chosen to the All-Decade team for 2001 to 2010. For the second year in a row since he retired, Papaloukas is appearing at the Final Four in Berlin as an ambassador for the event, building on his active support for One Team and other activities in his role as Euroleague Basketball Legend.
It’s true that I am about to lose my record for appearances in the Final Four. If my old teammate Victor Khryapa plays in Berlin, as I hope he will now that he recovered from an injury, that will be his 10th Final Four, and I have only nine. So he will beat the record, but for the moment I still have a piece of it! As many times as I went to the Final Four, it never got tiring. The Final Four is the event that you prepare for all season, the most important thing at the end of the road you and your team are on together. Everybody wants to be there and for very good reason: to win the title! This year, it will be a little different because some of the big names we are used to seeing – Real Madrid, Olympiacos, Maccabi, Panathinaikos, Barcelona – are not around, but we’ve seen a team like Laboral Kutxa come back after a long time and a new team, Lokomotiv Kuban, get there at the last moment. It was a very enjoyable season to watch and that makes this a very interesting Final Four.
Of course, I remember the last Final Four in Berlin, both the good and the bad. That was the season when I left CSKA Moscow after six years with that great organization because I really wanted to go home and play again for my first Euroleague team, Olympiacos. CSKA was the defending champion and we had won twice in the previous three years, but it was a decision I took because I knew what I wanted: it was a big thing in my life to play again with Olympiacos. The club was trying in those years to invest and come back to the Euroleague elite. And I wanted to be part of that effort of helping Olympiacos reach the top again. It was a new project, but by returning to the Final Four for the first time in a decade, I think we did something important. We had a great team and a good season, but the small details made winning the title impossible for us.
It was a tough Final Four because our semifinal was against our big rival, Panathinaikos. It’s difficult to play with a team from the same country, especially Olympiacos against Panathinaikos, I think. We did not play a good game, but we were close and the game came down to one shot at the end. We didn’t make it and we lost the game. But I don’t think that in a game like this you lose by one shot or you win by one shot. So I don’t look back and say we didn’t qualify because of that shot. Semifinals are like finals, and for me, in those games you need to be two shots ahead so you don’t have to worry.
It’s part of an athlete’s life, when you play sports, you have to learn to live with what comes. I wish we could have won, but life never goes exactly the way you want. It was really important, though, for Olympiacos to come back to the Final Four that year and return the next. It was the beginning of a great future for the club. Not a lot of teams go to the Final Four their first year and win it. It’s a progression they have to learn, and in basketball as in life, experience is very important. I think that was important for Olympiacos, like any team, to make that first step to bigger things by returning to the Final Four that year.
Experience is very important at the Final Four. If it’s the first time and you’ve never been there, it’s a big shot to meet all the big personalities from basketball, the coaches, the administrators, the Euroleague people, agents, NBA people. It’s difficult for some players to concentrate on the game, but after a second or third time, it’s much easier. You realize that the most important thing is the semifinal, and then if you do that right, the final. All the other things are secondary to that. The first time, it’s like the first time a kid goes to the amusement park. The next time, you know better how to handle it.
In Berlin in 2009, I think it was the only time that all the teams didn’t stay together in the same hotel, but I know it didn’t affect me. By that time, at Final Fours, most of my time was spent in the hotel room, where the team ate and watched video, or at the arena. I didn’t walk around the lobby of the hotel or go around the city or anything. I didn’t sleep much either at Final Fours! I spent all my time thinking and thinking and thinking. So it was not strange for me to not be staying with the other teams, and it wasn’t strange for my teammates who were there for the first time. They didn’t know it was different!
Now, I am going back to Berlin and back to the Final Four as an ambassador, which I did last year in Madrid, too. And you know, it’s great to be at a Final Four this way, too. To me, I love just being around basketball, and to be at this event is to be around basketball like nowhere else, really. All the hype is true: if you enjoy basketball, you can’t enjoy it more than being at a Final Four. There is so much going on related to basketball, and the games are always great. You can live and talk and eat and sleep basketball 24/7, from the moment you arrive to the moment you leave. It’s a weekend for basketball lovers.
Being close to the court as a spectator is very interesting for a former player, too. You see a lot more: the looks on the faces, the way the teams are talking, the mentality and so on. And now I go without stress! As a player, you only think about how to win the game, help your team and take the title. Only what happens on the court is on your mind. When you go as a fan, you enjoy in the different way. And watching the game without stress you read the game better and see situations you can’t on the court. When you see from above it’s different than when you are on the court or the bench. Much, much different. As a player, you focus only on your job. As a fan, you can focus on everything.
I have been focusing lately on the Final Four teams. My old team, CSKA, played great basketball the whole season. They have the quality and the quantity, plus a lot of experience. They will play the semifinal against Lokomotiv, a team they know better than any other. It will be a special game with two Russian teams. For sure, CSKA has a little bit of an advantage from being at this stage so often before. CSKA knows the Final Four and for Lokomotiv it’s the first time. But it’s a semifinal and what’s great about a Final Four is anything can happen.
In the other game, Fenerbahce has a little more experience as a team and of course has a coach in Zeljko Obradovic who knows what to do at a Final Four. Laboral Kutxa plays in a different way than a lot of teams, their own style, so it’s going to be interesting to see which team can make the game go at its own rhythm. My old teammate Ioannis Bourousis has had a great year and I think he gets a lot from winning the title last year with Real Madrid, because he plays very calm and makes the right decisions.
We also have really great coaches in this Final Four, coaches who more or less have different ways of playing and understanding basketball. And the Final Four is always about the personalities of the players and the coaches. So that is going to make this one really interesting. We are going to really enjoy watching these games.