UcanUwill wrote:Greece should be one of the favorites, their achilles heal is shooting. Seeing Giannis, Papagiannis, Walkup and Calathes is some blast from the past lineup. It can come down to Calathes shooting, as everyone decides to gamble on him, and he always takes those shots. Killed Monaco just like that. But Greece seem to have another bad shooter at all times, so opponents can switch on who they sag off. A bit tricky situation for Spanoulis to handle, is there a single very good shooter on that team
Toliopoulos and Larentzakis are the best shooters on the team, and are quite good shooters overall, and they can do catch and shoot as well, although that's the one thing that they are not that good at. For example, they are not really competent at running Spanoulis action. But very few shooters are. Tyle Dorsey for example sucks at it. Greece hasn't had anyone that can run it properly since Spanoulis. It would be nice if they did, since they have the coach that can set it up to perfection.
Charalampopolous and Papagiannis are quite good spot shooters, but they usually need to be at least somewhat open and set. Papanikolaou is also, but he's kind of a wildcard, because he's super streaky and inconsistent. He can go 2 weeks without barely making an open shot, or he can go 2 weeks where he hits like 45 to 50 percent on open threes.
Mitoglou isn't really a good long distance shooter, but he does have very deep range, and he can potentially be a big mismatch problem as a stretch five, if he hits a few threes in a game, which he can do.
Then there are Giannis, Kostas A., Kalaitzakis, Walkup, Calathes, Moraitis...and yeah, they are all pretty much absolutely horrible outside shooters. Although Kalaitzakis in theory should be a capable shooter, because he used to be a sharp shooter when he was younger, believe it or not. But these days, he's horrible. At least with Calathes and Walkup, they do
occasionally, hit like 4 threes in a game. But every team always leaves them wide open and dares them to shoot. With Calathes, he never doesn't shoot, even if he's 0 for 10 from three, he will keep jacking it, falling into the defense's trap of leaving him wide open and daring him to shoot.
Walkup on the other hand is very quick to not shoot if he isn't making threes in a game. Not uncommon for him to not even take a shot in a whole game. So he won't shoot you out of a game like Calathes will. But it's a catch 22 situation between them, because while Calathes will shoot you into a loss, on the other hand, if you get real lucky and his shot is falling that day, the opponent will leave him wide open and he will keep getting easy shots and make them, and you can win the game that way.
The problem is that on average, Walkup maybe has a good shooting game in like 3 out of 10 games. While Calathes does so in maybe like 1 out of 10 games. And if we look at Calathes' record with the national team at it, it's just horrific. He's literally been the absolute 100% cause of numerous Greece losses in elimination games, and he absolutely cost them a gold medal in 2015 (along with the idiot coach Katsikaris). On the bright side, he's overdue for his 1 out of 10 good shooting games, and maybe Greece will get lucky with that this time, instead of him again shooting the team into a loss at the elimination rounds.
If we had to make a list of the worst shooting main rotation point guards in EuroLeague, Calathes is probably the worst and Walkup is maybe the 2nd or 3rd worst, along with Campazzo.
