By Nikos Varlas/ varlas@eurohoops.net
Vasilis Spanoulis will stay in Olympiacos for the next two seasons after his Sunday meeting with the team owners Panagiotis and Giorgos Aggelopoulos.
While everyone expected for the meeting to be held on Monday, but the two sides decided to speed up the procedure. Spanoulis spoke with the Aggelopoulos brothers about his the future of the team and the mutual decision is already made. Spanoulis is ready to re-sign with the club after a long conversation that had to do much more with the direction and the ambitions of Olympiacos and less with the financial terms of the deal.
Spanoulis wants to be a part of a roster that can compete for the Euroleague title and Olympiacos is ready to provide him with such an environment. Spanoulis is a three times Euroleague champ and MVP Final Four, twice with Olympiacos and once with Panathinaikos back in 2009.
However, Spanoulis’ transfer to Olympiacos, in the summer of 2010, marked a new step in his career and a change in the balance of the powers in European basketball. Within a young and rebuilding team, Spanoulis not only led a Euroleague title run in 2012, but went on to achieve a historical repeat in 2013. In the process he gained another two Euroleague Final Four MVP awards, thus joining Toni Kukoc as the only players in the history of European basketball to achieve that distinction on three occasions.
He recently won the Greek league championship with Olympiacos for the second year in a row by leading the Reds for the first time in two road wins against Panathinaikos in the finals for a total of a 3-1 triumph, marked by his big buzzer beating three pointers.
Spanoulis himself confirmed the deal by saying: “I am happy to stay. It was an easy process to get a done deal with the owners. I am thankful to them for keeping me in Olympiacos. I wish that we will have new successes and new dreamlike moments in the next two years”.