Greece earns its first Eurobasket medal in 16 years

Greece survived a furious precocious rally by Finland to win 92-89 connected Sunday and gain third spot successful the 2025 Eurobasket successful Riga,  Latvia.

This was Greece’s archetypal medal successful the tournament since 2009, when it besides won 3rd place.

The Greeks got implicit the atrocious nonaccomplishment to Turkey successful the semifinal and played a large defence against 1 of the champion teams successful discourtesy successful this Eurobasket, and chiefly connected NBA star Lauri Markkanen.

The players of manager Vassilis Spanoulis led from start to finish, beating The Finns astatine their game, I.e. successful three-pointers, with fantabulous scoring rates extracurricular the 6.75-meter line.

Tyler Dorsey, Vassilis Toliopoulos and Dinos Mitoglou outdid the Finnish defence with their triples, while skipper Kostas Papanikolaou led the antiaircraft effort successful the archetypal that contained Finland to conscionable 34 points – with Greece starring 48-34.

In the third 4th Finland tried to travel backmost slashed their shortage to six (59-53), but Greece recovered and stretched its vantage up to 17 (81-64 and 84-67, the second with 4:31 to go) successful the last 4th earlier the Finns mounted their ultimately unsuccessful comeback. Finland took vantage of respective Greek turnovers and reduced the region to conscionable 1 constituent (90-89) with 5 seconds left.

Giannis Antetokounmpo had different large game, scoring 30 points and grabbing 17 rebounds. He besides led Greece successful assists (6) and blocks (2). Dorsey made 20 and Toliopoulos 15.