To put it into the simplest of terms, basketball is a game of creating and preventing advantages. These advantages come in various different shapes and forms, on a team-level as well as an individual level. There’s a certain joy connected to watching a player create advantages in unusual ways, and it’s a joy I felt when diving into the games of Nikolaos Georgalis, or as fans know him, Nikos Galis, Greek legend and Hall of Famer.
Before examining the ins and outs of his game, however, a very brief summary of Galis’ life and career. He was born in Union City, New Jersey to Greek parents and attended Seton Hall University. There, he developed into one of the best scorers in the nations, averaging 27.5 PPG by his senior year, which made him the third-highest scorer in the nation, behind Idaho State’s Lawrence Butler and some guy called Larry Bird. Galis was drafted 68th by the Boston Celtics but suffered a severe ankle injury in training camp. The team decided not to offer him a contract, which Red Auerbach later described as the biggest mistake of his career. Galis signed in Greece for AS Aris Thessaloniki and later also played three years for Panathinakos Athens. For his career, he scored around 25k points in professional games, won eight Greek championship, five Greek league MVPs, the 1987 EuroBasket + MVP and so much more.
He accomplished all of that despite being undersized at 6ft, not blessed with a great vertical jump, and even though he had a quick first step, the spacing during that time of FIBA basketball rarely allowed for drives straight to the rim. He had to find other ways to create advantages. One of those ways was via his mid-air functionality. As Skyfall explained to me, from a physics standpoint, two players with the same vertical leap also have the same hangtime. Since Galis’ vertical leap is nothing special, neither is his hangtime. Still, it seems like he hangs in the air forever, but this is an optical illusion (all of this was also explained to me by Skyfall). Galis possessed such incredible core strength that he could maintain a productive body position almost until he landed. While normal people, and many basketball players as well in fact, lose a lot of their shooting and passing accuracy/power after they reach the apex of their jump, Galis excelled in these moments. This trait gave him some ridiculous versatility. On his most frequent non-transition shot, the self-created midrange pull-up, he had the possibility of delaying his release until his defender, who jumped to contest him, was already on his way down and therefore unable to make an effective contest. To understand these shots, it’s important to note that none of Galis’ midrange pull-ups bore much resemblance to Kawhi Leonard’s midrange pull-up. They look much wilder, more out-of-control and often involve significant momentum forwards or backwards. Don’t let the optics fool you, however; Galis was always in control. Not only was he able to maintain a productive posture in mid-air for as long as he needed to get the best possible shot, he also mastered the art of converting these mid-air shots, making 41 of his 78 midrange attempts (52.6%) in the ten games I tracked. Additionally, only eight of the 78 made shots were assisted on; they were mostly tough, self-created pull-up jump shots. Combine the ability to vary his release time with an extremely high release point, which occasionally made his pull-up look more like a throw-in in European football than a basketball shot, and Galis’ midrange game, despite his size limitations, was almost unguardable. His sweet spots were in short midrange area, which allowed him to use the glass effectively as well. Especially on shots with significant forward momentum, he occasionally converted over the backboard instead of attempting to swish the shot.
Basketball’s most famous signature shots, think Dirk’s fadeaway or Kareem’s sky hook, all have one thing in common; they’re bad shots for 99.9% of basketball players. Galis’ flying midrange shots work similarly. They’re not replicable by most other players, but Galis made them at such a frequency and evidently also at such an efficiency that they were great shots for his teams. In fact, he was so good at shooting in mid-air that he occasionally even jumped on his free throws. I don’t know his reasoning, but I see two possible explanations: He either used the free throws to practice his jump shot, which was Hal Greer’s reason for jumping on foul shots, or he actually just considered himself better at shooting in the air than on the ground, which might have actually been the case.
Unlike other stars of this era of FIBA basketball, namely Oscar Schmidt, Drazen Petrovic, Andrew Gaze, Antonello Riva and many more, Galis did not shoot a lot of three-pointers. In the eight games I tracked that involved a three-point line, he converted 10 of 23 three-point shots and took 14.2% of his shots from beyond the arc. He had the range, but the midrange was his preferred zone. He did do some work at the rim, however, even though the era’s bad spacing (compared to today) increased the degree of difficulty for penetrators. Nevertheless, Galis used his handle and angle changes to create space for drives to the hoop. His most effective move was a ridiculously quick right-handed in-and-out, which consistently left opponents off-balance. Of course, that move was also useful when creating space in the midrange. Over the ten-game-sample, Galis made 55 of his 84 shots in the paint, a decent 65.5% conversion rate. Those fifty-five makes do include some very easy transition layups. After the opposition took their shot, Galis was often the first man on the break, and his backcourt partner Panagiotis Giannakis frequently found him with his outstanding outlet passes.
Because of how comfortable he was with mid-air shots, Galis rarely ever took “bad shots”, even though defenses were constantly trying to force him into unfavorable territory. Some teams tried to force him to his left, his “weaker” hand. It forced Galis to make some adjustments, but didn’t seem to hinder his effectiveness at all. When going left, he turned from a score-first guard to a more balanced, sometimes even pass-first, player. Instead of torturing the opposition with his midrange pull-up, he sliced through the first line of defense and dumped it off to his teammates in the dunker spot. In the 10 games I tracked, he dished out 60 assists and 25 of them resulted in layups or dunks. After getting by his own defender, Galis often saw himself confronted with one, two, sometimes even three help defenders — the limited spacing allowed such drastic collapsing on single penetrators — but he often found a way to squeeze the ball through the tiniest passing windows to open teammates. In other words: Galis’ scoring generated a lot of gravity and he did a great job leveraging said gravity. So while Galis will always be remembered for his outstanding ability to put the ball in the basket, it’s important to note that he was a really good playmaker as well.
His mid-air functionality was also useful for his passing. Jumping to find a pass can often be a sign of desperation, but Galis had so much time to find a teammate that he rarely ever got into trouble. He would, in fact, frequently, at least in the games I watched, leave his feet, fake a pass in one direction, usually baiting the defender, and then find a wide open teammate. Even when saving the ball from going out of bounds, usually a hasty, uncoordinated act, he had the time to look for passing options.
I found it quite difficult to capture the essence of Nikos Galis’ offensive game, but I believe I’ve described all of its main components. He was an outstanding athlete, in a very non-traditional sense; his athletic ability went far beyond his core strength as well. At the 1987 EuroBasket, he played every single minute, seven full games in nine days. In the final against the Soviet Union, Panagiotis Giannakis and Panagiotis Fasoulas, arguably Greece’s second and third best players, fouled out in the second half, and even though Galis hadn’t taken a break all tournament, he scored 12 points in the final few minutes of regulation and during the overtime period to secure Greece its first of two EuroBasket titles. This incredible stamina earned him the nickname “Iron Man”. In addition to the athletic traits, he was an incredible shooter with outstanding touch from the midrange as well as a high-level creator and playmaker. All in all, he was just a fantastically impressive basketball player, who clearly worked thousands of hours to perfect his unique skillset and make the most of his talent.
