Liddell on Spanoulis: 'I love him, I talk to my mother about him all the time'

At a press conference in Cyprus, I. Jay Liddell said something no organiser had prepared for: "I love him. I talk to my mother about him all the time." That man is Vassilis Spanoulis, who has just stepped onto the Aris BC coaching bench after more than two decades playing at the top of the EuroLeague. Liddell's stat line from that game boils down to ten numbers: 22 minutes and 10 seconds, 15 points, 6/8 on two-pointers, 0/1 from three, 3/3 at the line, 4 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 turnovers, 1 steal, 1 block, and a performance index rating (PIR) of 17. Aris beat Red Star Belgrade 98-74 in a preseason friendly tournament staged in Cyprus. That 17 does not say much on its own. But how it was produced does. Red Star is no soft opponent. This is a EuroLeague club, the top tier of European basketball, a level Aris has dreamed of but never reached for years. A 24-point friendly win over a EuroLeague side is enough for Greek fans to ask themselves: is this the start of a new era? Last summer Aris carried out a rebuild built around its coach. Spanoulis — a three-time EuroLeague champion, a former league MVP, and one of the greatest scoring guards in the history of European basketball — used his personal prestige to pull in a wave of imports. "We did everything to bring these players to Aris," he said. At national-team level, Spanoulis belonged to the Greek generation that beat Team USA in the semi-final of the 2026 FIBA World Championship. When a figure like that sits on the coaching chair, his pull becomes a club asset. European basketball has no salary cap and no draft; a sentence like that is equivalent to an investment pledge. The front office has placed its money and its faith beneath one man. Liddell is one of those names. A 24-year-old forward from American basketball, he is relearning the game from scratch — its rules, its pace, its space. His shot distribution paints a clear picture. He took 8 two-pointers, made 6, and attempted only one three, missing it. All three free throws went in. That is the profile of a forward who attacks the interior — cutting, rolling, absorbing contact, drawing fouls — not a stretch forward who pulls the floor apart. On nights without basketball, I switch to reading each number. And the most striking number here is the zero: no three-point volume. In modern European basketball, where the floor is tighter, the contact heavier, a forward who lives on two-pointers is a double-edged blade. In friendlies, opponents have not scouted you properly. Once the season starts, defences will sink into the paint, hand him the ball and say: "Shoot it." If he cannot answer, the space for his teammates disappears with it. PIR — European basketball's evaluation metric — is not the same as NBA PER or EFF. It adds positive stats and subtracts missed shots, turnovers and fouls. A PIR of 17 in 22 minutes is a solid efficiency mark, but it is still only the data of a single preseason friendly, where defensive intensity runs far lower. Watching the Cyprus series, it is clear this is a friendly tournament gathering big names: Aris, Red Star, Maccabi, plus Olympiacos fans turning up to cheer Spanoulis himself. The neutral ground in Cyprus is becoming a commercial and sporting meeting point for European basketball each preseason. As for Spanoulis, it is his own players who sketch his coaching portrait. Liddell describes him: "He coaches everyone very demandingly, he wants us to be good. He focuses a lot on details." Tactics are not for reading, but for seeing two moves ahead. A former guard of that calibre typically builds a system around perimeter orchestration and off-ball cutting for forwards, not a run-and-gun approach. Liddell is honest about himself too. "I still make mistakes in the details, I learn every day," he said. And: "We are in preparation right now. We treat all games the same… to build our chemistry." That framing shows he understands he is not yet a finished product at the European level. Based on my experience watching preseason friendly games, the flow of American players to Europe is a durable structural feature. Every year, dozens of young forwards from the NCAA or semi-pro American leagues land in Greece, Serbia, Spain, and most need half a season to adjust to FIBA rules, the slower pace and the cramped spacing. Here, the data says one thing and the media story says another. The local paper ran the headline: "Aris to LOVE! They 'swallowed' Red Star in Cyprus." That is the language of preseason joy, and it covers a drier reality: friendly results carry almost no predictive value. Strong teams often play friendlies at low intensity, hide their sets, and do not scout opponents. Liddell himself implicitly pushes back against that glow. He called the game "difficult, against a EuroLeague team," then stressed: "We treat all games the same." A 24-year-old who knows his 15 points are like the first chapter of a book. The bigger risk sits in the team's structure, not in a friendly. Aris is a project driven by one man: Spanoulis. He pulls in the players, sets the standards, keeps the fire. If his prestige and relationships wobble — because of results, pressure, any reason — the whole construction built on that personal foundation risks cracking with them. The model is common in European basketball, and also very fragile. I once ran on the court; now I run on charts. And on the charts, the available data is a single sample: one friendly, no season numbers, no contract information, no injury data. Building durable conclusions on that is an illusion. What is worth tracking over the next three months lies in Liddell's three-point volume across the first 10 to 15 competitive games. If that number hovers around one attempt per game, Aris's offensive spacing will shrink, and opposing coaches will know exactly where to set the trap. Alongside it sits the chemistry question. A player saying he tells his mother about his coach is a signal of trust. But personal trust does not automatically turn into collective wins. Spanoulis reminds everyone: "We have a long way to go as a team." It may be modesty, or it may be a warning. What is certain is that the new season will answer everything.