EuroLeague power rankings, season preview and predictions for the 2023-24 season
EuroLeague Power Rankings and EuroLeague Betting Odds — A Tier (Final Four Probable’s): Panathinaikos, Anadolu Efes Istanbul, Olympiacos, AS Monaco, Maccabi Tel Aviv, and Fenerbahce
Panathinaikos
Odds to Win Championship (via DraftKings): 600/1
Prediction: 7th
Panathinaikos signed 11 new players this offseason and brought in Turkish head coach Ergin Ataman who won back-to-back EuroLeague titles with Anadolu Efes Istanbul in 2021 and 2022. You couldn’t pick a better coach to turn a program around. When Ataman took over Efes in the 2017-18 season they were coming off of a dead-last finish the season before. He rebuilt their roster in one summer and brought them to the EuroLeague championship game. Can he do the same with Panathinaikos? Maybe, but unlikely.
The overall talent is there for this team to be almost guaranteed a playoff spot as long as they stay healthy. Kostas Sloukas joined from Olympiacos in the most controversial transfer of the summer. They also signed Matthias Lessort from Partizan, one of the scariest rebounders and interior players in Europe. Sloukas and Lessort will form one of the deadliest pick-and-roll duos in EuroLeague, Europe’s equivalent to last season’s James Harden Joel Embiid pick-and-roll to an extent.
This will open up the floor for other additions such as Juancho Hernangomez, Dinos Mitoglou, Kyle Guy, Jerian Grant, and others. Their firepower is among the best in the league, so why are they only seventh in our pre-season power rankings?
For starters, just because Ataman built a championship contender over one offseason before doesn’t mean he can do it again. It’s very difficult to make a brand new roster click over just a few weeks of pre-season and be ready right out the gate for EuroLeague. A slow start can often mean your chances of a top-four finish are gone.
Also, even with all of its firepower. This team has shortcomings. The most glaring one is how else are they creating elite offense outside of the Sloukas and Lessort pick and roll? They will have other options such as Vildoza pick-and-rolls, getting Guy shooting off movement, post and nail touches for Hernangomez, and more, but it’s hard to see any of these options being borderline unstoppable.
In the Greek Supercup final against Olympiacos, we saw this playout with Panathinaikos only managing to score 11 points in the first half. They went scoreless from seven minutes left in the first quarter to three minutes to go in the second. They didn’t score another field goal until one minute was left in the quarter. For all of this team's talent, very little of it implores opposing defenses to dig deep and get creative in their defensive schemes to get stops. This team is good, not great. Seventh is more than fair.
Anadolu Efes Istanbul
Odds to Win Championship (via DraftKings): 1400/1
Prediction: 6th
After winning back-to-back EuroLeague championships in 2021 and 2022, the Ergin Ataman bus ran out of gas and Efes failed to even qualify for the EuroLeague playoffs last season. Ataman left for Panathinaikos, and star guard Vasilije Micic finally made the jump to the NBA, signing with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
It was time for Efes to rebuild, so they did. Young Turkish coach Erdem Can has taken over, and Darius Thompson was signed from Baskonia to fill the Micic-sized hole on their roster. We’re optimistic about this squad and did a deep dive into why that is earlier in the summer.
The reality is that this team will probably look similar to Ataman’s Efes. They will have more tempo though, but still be bombing threes and relying heavily on pick-and-rolls and isolation. The bet here is that Efes’ recipe for success has not gone sour, it just needed some new chefs.
Olympiacos
Odds to Win Championship (via DraftKings): 800/1
Prediction: 5th
Last season’s runner-ups once again had their EuroLeague championship dreams crushed by a last-second shot, with this season’s more brutal than the last. The summer brought more pain as 2022-23 EuroLeague MVP Sasha Vezenkov departed for the Sacramento Kings and Kostas Sloukas left for Panathinaikos.
We did a deep dive on Olympiacos’ ability to replace these players a few weeks back. While their off-season additions of Luke Sikma, Nigel Williams-Goss, Ignas Brazdeikis, and Nikola Milutinov make a lot of sense it is not enough to replace Vezenkov who was the best player in Europe last season.
Head coach Georgios Bartzokas is a mastermind, though. They have enough options on offense to still be good on that end of the floor, but their crunch-time offense will probably leave a lot to be desired. Their defense could be the best in Europe though. They completely shut down Panathinaikos in the Greek Supercup Final in one of the best team defense performances we may see all season. They already seem to be in perfect harmony on that side of the ball, and that is why Olympiacos still projects to have a very good EuroLeague season.
AS Monaco
Odds to Win Championship (via DraftKings): 600/1
Prediction: 4th
After making the EuroLeague Final Four last season Monaco responded with even more improvements this summer. They added Terry Tarpey for wing depth, Mam Jaiteh to give themselves a lot of options at center, Petr Cornelie who should thrive in an expanded role, and former All-NBA guard Kemba Walker. Not to mention they’ve still got Mike James, Elie Okobo, Jordan Loyd, and Donatas Motiejunas.
With Sasa Obradovic in charge, this is going to be a really good team once again with their sights set on the Final Four. So why only fourth? Well, their best offensive talent — Walker, James, Loyd, and Okobo — cannot all play together and all kind of do the same things. They don’t get the most out of one another, and that brings down their overall ceiling very marginally but in the top-four, margins are all that separates any of these teams.
They also don’t have a very strong homecourt and had a heavy dose of James drama this summer where James did not seem super-thrilled about the Walker signing, and there were rumors that he was going to leave for Olympiacos. That hasn’t been addressed, and lack of perfect cohesiveness alongside roster congestion drops them out of the top three in our pre-season EuroLeague power rankings.
Maccabi Tel Aviv
Odds to Win Championship (via DraftKings): 1400/1
Prediction: 3rd
Maccabi Tel Aviv is one of two teams that, in our opinion, is not getting nearly enough hype heading into the 2023-24 EuroLeague season. Perhaps that is best for them. Continuity is an underrated asset in EuroLeague. There is so much turnover for the majority of teams each summer that it is very difficult to keep a core group of players together for more than two seasons unless you’re one of the giants.
Continuity is something Maccabi has struggled with a lot since winning the 2014 EuroLeague championship under David Blatt but that is not a problem this year. Their dynamic backcourt of Lorenzo Brown and Wade Baldwin is coming back as is Notre Dame alum Bonzie Colson (my number 1 why am I not hearing about NBA interest in this guy? Player for this season). These three are arguably the best point guard, shooting guard, and small forward trio in EuroLeague and they are surrounded by good depth and the right pieces.
Roman Sorkin, Jake Cohen, Josh Nebo, and John DiBartolomeo are all coming back. New faces Tamir Blatt, Jasiel Rivero, James Webb, and Antonius Cleveland are coming in. Rivero was an excellent post-up and roll player last season. He is exactly the type of big man you want playing with Brown and Baldwin. His teammate at Valencia last season, Webb, will provide them with the stretch big they need when they need maximum spacing for Brown and Baldwin as a counter to teams clogging the paint. Cleveland is a good shooter, and alongside DiBartolomeo they can eat minutes for Brown and Baldwin and be productive.
This a versatile, cohesive, talented, and hungry squad. They’ve got one of the best home courts in EuroLeague to go with it and were one win away from the EuroLeague Final Four last season. This season, they could get over the hump and finally return to EuroLeague’s elite.
Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul
Odds to Win Championship (via DraftKings): 800/1
Prediction: 2nd
Fenerbahce is the other team not getting enough hype, and we don’t know why. This team is good, like really good. They pushed Olympiacos to a do-or-die Game 5 in last season's playoffs and are bringing back their entire core, and then some depth with the additions of Yam Madar, Sertac Sanli, and Georgios Papagiannis. They also added Raul Neto but he suffered a bad injury with Brazil at the 2023 FIBA World Cup, and Arturs Zagars — the shining starlet of the FIBA World Cup — and sent him on loan to BC Wolves. He could be recalled if he starts playing incredibly well.
This squad just has a ton of talented depth. Scottie Wilbekin, Yam Madar, and Nick Calathes are at point guard. Tyler Dorsey, Marko Guduric, Dyshawn Pierre, and Melih Mahmutoglu are on the wings. Nate Sestina — the Kentucky alum was one of the best shooters in Europe last season — and Nigel Hayes-Davis at the four. Then Johnathan Motley, Sertac Sanli, and Georgios Papagiannis round things out at the five. That’s not even the whole roster.
This roster will be able to counter everything opposing teams throw at them, and with Dimitris Itoudis as their head coach, they will counter everything thrown at them. They will counter opposing teams counters, they will wear teams down by constantly taking away what they do best, and always finding new ways to score on the other end. This has the makings of a great team, and they should have a great season.