The second guest in Basketball Sphere’s “When the Noise Stops” series is the head coach of CSKA Moscow – Andreas Pistiolis.
For thirty years Andreas Pistiolis has sat next to the men who make the final call. Zeljko Obradovic, then Dimitris Itoudis, then, at Galatasaray and now in Moscow, himself.
He is a Greek who has built a home in cities that were never his, and who says he has learned to do that anywhere. We spoke about the doubt that lives behind every confident decision, about what a player gives away in the first minute of a conversation, and about why the night after a title is the one he wants to end as fast as he can. Basketball was only ever the thing he was standing next to while the rest of his life happened.
At fifteen you already knew you would not be a player at the highest level, though you kept playing a few more years. When did it become clear that the game would still be your whole life?
“To be clear, I stopped playing at around eighteen. But by fifteen I already knew I wanted to be a coach. It had less to do with a single day and more with a growing sensation as I grew up. I knew I was not going to play at a high level, and that was the only level that interested me. At the same time, I knew basketball had to stay part of my life. The tactics, all of it, always excited me. That is how I found my path.”
You spent almost three decades inside one club, then left Greece for the first time at thirty-five. What did leaving take from you that you did not expect?
“It was a very difficult decision to leave Panathinaikos and Greece, but ultimately the right one. It took me out of my comfort zone. Once you do that, there is no safety net and no way out. You find yourself all in.
I learned a lot by coming into contact with different cultures and different ways of doing things. I expanded, in how I approach things and how I work. That was the gift hidden inside leaving my country and my team.”
You sat closer to Zeljko Obradovic and then to Dimitris Itoudis than anyone else did. What did you see in them that the game never saw?
“People always see the success. They see the result, but not everything that happens on the way to it. What no one ever sees is the process. The doubt, the questions, the way you work your way up to certainty.
True leaders question everything, and in the end they appear sure and confident about their decisions. Most people never see the moment you face the dilemma, before you reach that certainty. That was true of both Zeljko and Dimitris, and it means more with them because of what they won.”
Then came Galatasaray, and the bench was yours alone. What did you feel there that sixteen years as an assistant had never made you feel?
“Excitement, but also responsibility. Not only did I get my chance as a head coach, I got it at a prestigious club with a lot of fans and zero tolerance. Those fans expect victories. I was ready for that. I was not romantic about it. I understood the difficulties, and I knew I had to learn while working.
The pressure of every decision is something you grow into, even though you can never fully be ready. No matter what you imagine, you cannot know what you will face when you are the only one deciding, and everything you do touches everything else.”
You once said Istanbul was the first place where you felt at home immediately. You do not live there anymore. What do you still miss?
“Greeks and Turks, and Balkan people in general, focus on our differences. But we have far more in common than not. It is easy for a Greek to feel at home in Turkey, and that was my experience of Istanbul. I do miss it. The thing I have done best in my life is make a home in every place I have gone. I have lived in Moscow for more than ten years now, with a break, and it is also home. The same happens when I go back to Athens.”
When you sit across from a player you might sign, what are you reading in him that has nothing to do with how he plays?
“I love talking to players. You can watch all the footage and gather information, but some things you only see face to face. I want to see how they respond when I tell them their role, how they receive it. The meeting gives you a sense of their culture, their intelligence.
People tell their story in the way they speak, without meaning to. The words a person chooses are specific to him. They reveal how he thinks and where he comes from. So the most important thing for me in that conversation is to understand the man, and then to judge whether he is compatible with how I think.”
Winning has become a habit at CSKA. What happens inside you on the night after a title, when the building is empty?
“I have said many times that I enjoy the part that takes you up to the title more than the part after it. I am not good at celebrating. I am not good at living the glory. I thrive in the grind.
During the celebration I feel satisfaction, happiness at not having failed the people around me, my players, my management, the fans. But part of my mind is already on the next step, already building the process that leads to the next one. The moment after the title is the least important. It is the one I get through as fast as I can. What I live for is everything that comes before it.”
When it is finished, what do you want the people who live with you, not the fans, to say about the man who came home from those nights?
“That everything about me was honest. That what I say is what you get, that I stayed true to my word and never deceived anyone. Most of all, that I am the kind of person who has your back in the hard moments, someone you can rely on when the chips are down. I want the people close to me to know I will stand by them when it is difficult. That is the legacy I care about, on a personal level.”
There is a pattern under everything Pistiolis says.
The doubt behind the confident decision, the home built in every city that was never his, the win he rushes through to get back to the work. He is a man who has spent his life in the seat next to the decision, and then in the seat itself, and who seems most at peace in the part everyone else is trying to get past.
He does not want to be remembered for the titles. He wants to be remembered as the one who stood by his people when it was hard. For someone who wins as often as he does, that is the quietest ambition in the room.
Next in When the Noise Stops: Iffe Lundberg, the man who loves to think in silence.
When the Noise Stops is a written interview series by Milos Srdjanov for Basketball Sphere. It asks basketball people about everything except basketball.
