Every EuroLeague roster arrives at training camp with at least one real question mark. For some teams it’s a hole on the roster, for others it’s a coaching change or a collapsed budget, and for a few it’s simply whether a star can still be who he used to be. With the 2026/27 season about to tip off, here’s the single biggest concern facing every team.
Anadolu Efes – Lack of an elite center
By the club’s own recent history, last season was described as “a complete disaster”. Coach Pablo Laso stays on for the reset, but the frontcourt he’s rebuilding around still lacks a proven anchor.
Bruno Fernando and Kai Jones are the primary centers, with Ercan Osmani and Dario Saric able to soak up minutes at the five, and none of them an established two-way force at this level. The backcourt, by contrast, is loaded: Mike James, Jordan Loyd, Isaia Cordinier, Matthew Strazel and Daron Russell give Efes as much shot-creation as almost anyone in the league.
That contrast is exactly the problem. Efes can beat teams in transition and off the dribble, but every dominant center left standing in the EuroLeague: Edy Tavares, Mathias Lessort, Nikola Milutinov, Jonas Valanciunas represents a size mismatch that a guard-heavy, center-thin roster simply has to absorb for 30-plus minutes a night, series after series.
Asvel – Off-court financial instability
This is less a quiet concern than a genuine offseason collapse. Tony Parker stepped away from ownership to become Asvel’s head coach and built a proposed €59 million budget, the largest in French basketball history, around Sylvain Francisco, plus Daniel Theis, Patty Mills, Armoni Brooks and Nick Weiler-Babb. Then the financing behind it fell apart, and as a result Asvel’s real budget was cut to roughly €24 million.
Francisco was the first casualty, leaving for Panathinaikos within weeks and soon Brooks, Weiler-Babb and Theis followed.
What’s left is a “Plan B” project headlined by Patty Mills and Parker insisting the long-term vision is intact. Ultimately, the sudden plunge from a historic €59 million budget to a €24 million reality means Asvel enters the EuroLeague season not just fighting for wins, but battling deep, overarching uncertainty about the club’s financial stability through the end of season.
Barcelona – How will the G League imports look?
New sporting director Xevi Pujol and new coach Aleksandar Sekulic didn’t just tweak Barcelona’s roster this summer, they fully rebuilt it. Eleven new signings arrived, leaving just four players from last season’s group.
Several of the new names arrive from the USA with no EuroLeague experience: Tosan Evbuomwan, Justin Minaya, Stanley Umude and Tyrese Martin came from the G-League. Even though the G League is a legitimate proving ground, it doesn’t replicate the discipline and physicality of a EuroLeague regular season played twice a week for eight months.
There’s no soft landing scheduled, either, as the Liga Endesa and EuroLeague both start immediately, and Sekulic is learning this specific group in real games rather than in a long preseason. If the newcomers need real time to adjust, Barcelona risks a first half of the season that looks more like a scouting project than a finished contender.
Baskonia – Galbiati’s uncertain situation
Paolo Galbiati delivered Baskonia’s first Copa del Rey title since 2009, but the club’s EuroLeague season and a quarterfinal playoff exit to Joventut in the Liga Endesa left plenty unconvinced, and his contract, a “1+1” deal with a club option, became the subject of a genuinely messy summer.
Reports in May said Baskonia was already searching for a replacement despite the trophy. Barcelona, hunting for a coach after Xavi Pascual’s departure, circled Galbiati directly. Baskonia itself reportedly lined up Velimir Perasovic as its own contingency plan. Galbiati, for his part, called the season “the most difficult of my life” and didn’t rule out leaving. It wasn’t until late June that sporting director Felix Fernandez publicly closed the door on the speculation.
The roster around Galbiati changed substantially while all of that played out. Baskonia lost eight players this summer, including Copa del Rey MVP Trent Forrest and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot who had the best season of his career, while bringing in a lot of unproved talent at this level. A coach whose job security was an open question all summer now also has to blend a meaningfully new roster, fast.
Bayern – Can the Washington/Obst backcourt actually function?
Bayern enters the season under a new head coach Anton Gavel. Bayern also reshuffled the roster around him, parting ways with eight players, while adding six new guys, most notable being Duane Washington Jr.
The fit question is specific. Washington arrives off a breakout 2025-26 at Partizan, where he became the team’s clear go-to scorer and describes himself bluntly as a “predominantly ball-handling guard.” Andreas Obst, meanwhile, is the reigning Bundesliga MVP and he’s at his best working off movement and ball screens designed to get him the ball, not standing in the corner watching someone else create.
Neither has ever been known as a plus defender, and pairing two shot-hungry, usage-craving guards in the same backcourt means somebody’s touches get squeezed no matter how well they get along.
Besiktas – Lacking EuroLeague experience
Besiktas returns to the EuroLeague for the first time since 2012-13. Dusan Alimpijevic has built a roster full of players with real EuroLeague mileage elsewhere, like Scottie Wilbekin, Furkan Korkmaz and Ante Zizic, but a remainder of the team does not have experience on this level of weekly intensity.
Individual pedigree is one thing, surviving the EuroLeague’s particular grind is another. History isn’t especially kind to newcomers in that exact spot. Plenty of talented rosters have needed a full season just to learn how brutal the week-to-week rhythm actually is before they could compete in it. Besiktas looks talented enough on paper to avoid being an easy out, but “on paper” and “in the reality” have rarely been the same thing for a team walking in cold.
Crvena Zvezda – How quickly will Navarro’s system click?
Ibon Navarro arrives in Belgrade after historic four-and-a-half-season run at Unicaja. He’s walking into a club that just endured a chaotic season of its own, after turbulent season under Sasa Obradovic.
The roster around him is almost as new as the coach. Patrick Baldwin Jr., Johnathan Motley, David Kramer, Nick Weiler-Babb and Chris Jones.
Navarro’s Unicaja sides were defined by relentless tempo, ball pressure and deep, trusted rotations, which is a demanding, specific identity that takes real repetition to install. Crvena Zvezda has the talent to play that way. The question is how many October and November losses it takes before the habits actually stick, and whether a fan base used to instant results is willing to wait that long.
Dubai – Finding roles for everyone
Coach Xavi Pascual inherited a genuinely enviable problem when he arrived at Dubai: too much quality talent for too few minutes. Tornike Shengelia, left Barcelona to join a frontcourt that already featured Filip Petrusev, and Dubai added Jaron Blossomgame and Mamadi Diakite on top of that.
It isn’t only the frontcourt. McKinley Wright, Elie Okobo and Thomas Walkup can all run the offense from the point, while Dzanan Musa and Dwayne Bacon return as the primary perimeter scorers.
That’s the tension: a two-year-old club with real trophy ambition doesn’t have the same locker-room capital that an established power like Fenerbahçe or Olympiacos has when a talented player is unhappy with his role. Too much depth is a good problem to have, right up until someone Dubai needs starts wondering why he isn’t playing.
Fenerbahce – Finding non-superstar roles for Clyburn and Larkin
The 2025 EuroLeague champions, kept adding proven go-to scorers on top of an already stacked roster. The headline move: Shane Larkin left provincial rival Anadolu Efes after eight seasons to sign directly with Fenerbahce, and Larkin himself has since said publicly that the backcourt he just joined is the deepest in the EuroLeague.
He’s not exaggerating about the depth. Will Clyburn, a 36-year-old who’s been a primary scoring option for most of his career, is another major signing to a team that already has its first options in Wade Baldwin and Talen Horton-Tucker.
The dilemma is straightforward: Larkin and Clyburn have both been the unquestioned first option on their previous rosters for years. None of them signed up to come off the bench, but there aren’t enough minutes to feed all of them at the usage rates they’re used to. It’s the same “too much talent” tension several EuroLeague rivals are wrestling with this year, Fenerbahçe just has an unusually star-studded version of it.
Hapoel Tel Aviv – Can Micic return to peak form?
Everything about Hapoel’s ceiling runs through one player. Vasilije Micic was former EuroLeague MVP and two time champion and Final Four MVP with Anadolu Efes, then left for the NBA in 2023 and spent two seasons bouncing through three franchises without ever recapturing that peak form.
He returned to Europe with Hapoel last year, and the entire 2026-27 project is built on the bet that, at 32, after a bad season for his standards, he still has enough of that MVP game left to bounce back next season.
For a club that’s gone from being the perennial second team in its own city to fielding one of the deepest, most expensively assembled rosters in the EuroLeague in barely two years, ambition has never been the issue. Whether it turns into wins depends almost entirely on whether the version of Micic that shows up looks more like his Efes years or his NBA ones.
Maccabi Tel Aviv – Severe imbalance between frontcourt and backcourt
Maccabi’s frontcourt build looks genuinely formidable: Daniel Theis signed a two-year deal, joined by returnee Bonzie Colson, and then there are established guys like Oshae Brisset, Jaylen Hoard, and Roman Sorkin, which ranks this frontcourt amongst the best in EuroLeague.
The backcourt tells a different story. Keaton Wallace signed a two-year deal, Yam Madar arrived, and Iffe Lundberg just locked in a fresh three-year extension. Solid pieces, but the picture got murkier after Lonnie Walker and reliable domestic point guard Tamir Blatt left the club.
Maccabi has assembled an elite frontcourt depth, but all that size and talent risks being neutralized if their thinned-out backcourt can’t consistently initiate the offense and deliver them the ball.
Milano – Can Alec Peters really be the first (or second) option?
After four seasons at Olympiacos, Alec Peters left this summer for Milano specifically chasing a bigger role. The swing question is whether Peters can hold up as a lead option under real pressure, and the same season provides both a warning sign and a reason for hope.
With Sasha Vezenkov away in the NBA for all of 2023-24, Peters was Olympiacos’s nominal top scorer for the year. And then, as the nominal first option in that spring’s playoff quarterfinal series against Barcelona, he was largely a non-entity: he opened Game 1 with just 1 point, and only had one double digit scoring nigh for the entire 5 game series. Weeks later, in the same Final Four run, he had two great games, dropping 23 points in the semifinal loss to Real Madrid, then adding 20 more in the third-place win over Fenerbahce.
Those two data points, from the exact same stretch of the exact same season, point in opposite directions: a near-invisible performance as the nominal go-to guy against Barcelona, followed by one Final Four run. He followed that with a solid, if unspectacular, EuroLeague season overall. Milano is betting that the Final Four version of Peters shows up more often than the Barcelona one, and which version they actually get is probably the single biggest factor in how far this specific roster can go.
Olympiacos – Playing away from their home arena
Olympiacos enters the season as the reigning EuroLeague champions and, unlike most of the league, they largely ran it back. Evan Fournier, Tyler Dorsey, Sasha Vezenkov, Nikola Milutinov, and many more are all still there under Georgios Bartzokas. This isn’t a roster question at all.
The issue is entirely off the court. Renovation of the Peace and Friendship Stadium in Piraeus is around 80% complete, but not finished in time for the season, so Olympiacos struck a deal to share AEK’s Sunel Arena for home games until the new SEF is ready, possibly returning sometime in the second half of the season. It isn’t unprecedented: during SEF’s previous renovation in the early 2000s, Olympiacos bounced between the Glyfada and Korydallos sports halls for two seasons.
What’s at stake is identity. Few teams in Europe lean on home-court intimidation the way Olympiacos does. Trying to manufacture that same atmosphere at a rival’s arena, for a title defense against a league that’s watching for any crack, is the one variable this roster can’t simply out-talent.
Panathinaikos – Too much star power: Can Obradovic bring it all together?
Panathinaikos didn’t just keep last year’s core, it kept adding to it. Guerschon Yabusele and Isaac Bonga came in as frontcourt reinforcements. Brancou Badio was poached straight off Valencia’s Final Four roster. And when Asvel’s financial project imploded this summer, Panathinaikos swooped in for Sylvain Francisco. Add all of that to holdovers Kostas Sloukas, Kendrick Nunn, Jerian Grant, Nigel Hayes-Davis, Juancho Hernangomez and Mathias Lessort, and Zeljko Obradovic is working with arguably the deepest collection of proven, ball-dominant talent in Europe.
That’s the problem the notes above are really pointing at: virtually every one of those names has, at some point in his career, been “the guy” for somebody. Obradovic, the most decorated coach in EuroLeague history, has built champions out of egos before, but this group requires more subtraction than addition, and subtraction is always the harder conversation to have with players this good.
The wrinkle nobody wanted: early injuries are delaying the true test of this roster. Nunn is out six to eight weeks following knee surgery, and Nigel Hayes-Davis is also sidelined to start the year. Having two major focal points in sickbay temporarily eases the scramble for touches, but it creates a false sense of clarity. Obradovic now to establish an initial hierarchy without two of his biggest weapons, meaning the real challenge of fitting all that star power into a single dynamic isn’t avoided, just delayed.
Paris – Can they find consistency?
After three previous coaches went to the NBA, Paris brought in new head coach Maxime Lefevre, a Minnesota Timberwolves assistant with no prior head-coaching experience at any level above college.
The roster mirrors that same boom-or-bust profile. T.J. Warren, a former 14th overall NBA pick who hasn’t looked like his best self since a 2020 injury and spent the past two seasons in the G League, arrives as the marquee name on a one-year deal, joined by fellow reclamation projects Alize Johnson and Tyson Etienne.
A club on its third head-coaching change in three years, betting its scoring punch on a player trying to rediscover form he last showed half a decade ago is inherently volatile. Pair that with Nadir Hifi, a high-volume, high-usage guard whose efficiency fluctuates based on the difficult shots he takes, and Paris is almost by definition signing up for feast-or-famine stretches rather than the steady week-to-week floor a 38-round regular season actually rewards.
Partizan – Can they survive a grueling early schedule?
Last season unraveled early and never fully recovered: Zeljko Obradovic left the bench in late November and Joan Penarroya took over from late December, ultimately guiding Partizan to a 15th-place EuroLeague finish. This summer brought close to a full roster reset, with eight new names and nine departures.
The calendar doesn’t do Parizan any favors. Partizan will play first game at home against Milano, then they have three road games against Paris, Bayern and Real Madrid, before returning to Belgrade to host Panathinaikos.
That opening stretch leaves zero grace period for a team still learning each other’s names. In front of a fanbase desperate to put last season’s disappointment behind them, early stumbles against elite competition could quickly turn the Belgrade atmosphere from an asset into an intense pressure cooker.
Real Madrid – How will Martinez handle the pressure in Madrid?
Sergio Scariolo is out, and Pedro Martinez is in. Real Madrid paid roughly €1 million to trigger Martínez’s release clause at Valencia just months after he delivered that club’s best season ever.
The roster turned also had noticeable changes. Most notably Mario Hezonja, who was key player for years before, left for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Trey Lyles, who had great rookie season in EuroLeague, also departed for NBA. Most noticable addition was probalby Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot.
None of that roster business is unusual for Madrid. What’s different is the standard: this is a club with essentially zero patience for a slow start, coming off a season in which they haven’t won a trophy, now handing the keys to a coach who’s never operated under that specific pressure. The goodwill that carried Martinez through a golden season in Valencia doesn’t automatically survive the first bad week in a locker room built on trophies-or-bust urgency.
Valencia – Lack of frontcourt power, plus an inexperienced coach
It’s hard to overstate how good last season was for Valencia: an ACB League title, the Supercopa, and the club’s first-ever EuroLeague Final Four appearance, all built by Pedro Martinez. Then, this summer, Martinez left. Breakout guards, Brancou Badio and Jean Montero, also left for Panathinaikos and Olympiacos.
In steps Xavi Albert, a Valencian making his EuroLeague head-coaching debut, with a staff built to compensate for exactly that inexperience. Assistant Israel Gonzalez spent four seasons as Alba Berlin’s actual head coach in this competition. It’s a sensible hire, but it’s still a first-time head coach replacing a EuroLeague Coach of the Year on short notice.
Then there is a frontcourt problem. It now leans on Mo Gueye, Neal Sako, Dylan Osetkowski and Nate Reuvers, a group without the proven interior punch, against a league that still has Edy Tavares, Mathias Lessort, Nikola Milutinov and Jonas Valanciunas patrolling the paint every week. A rookie EuroLeague coach and a thinner frontline is a lot to ask of a team trying to prove last season wasn’t a one-off.
Virtus – A team lacking a clear identity and star power
Last season was rough by any measure: a 14-24 finish, 17th in the EuroLeague standings, and the in-season firing of coach Dusko Ivanovic in late March. This summer brought a full reset under new head coach Alex Mumbru.
The single biggest loss by far was Carsen Edwards, taking his elite individual shot-making and night-in, night-out offensive production elsewhere. Replacing a proven EuroLeague game-changer is difficult enough on its own, but doing so while losing long-time glue guys like Alessandro Pajola leaves Virtus completely reinventing itself. New additions Marcus Carr, Wendell Moore Jr., Trent Frazier, and Kessler Edwards bring high upside, but none of them arrive with established mileage together.
That’s the real version of the “no clear identity” problem: it’s not a hypothetical about style, it’s the literal task facing a new coach who has to decide, from scratch and fast, whether this team defends, runs, or shoots its way to relevance, using a roster that didn’t exist together three months ago.
Zalgiris – How to hide Valanciunas and Edwards’ defensive flaws?
After 14 years Jonas Valanciunas is back in Europe. Alongside him, Carsen Edwards, one of the EuroLeague’s most prolific individual scorers, signed a 1+1 deal.
The offensive upside of this team is obvious. The concern is what happens on the other end. Valanciunas has always been more load-bearing post scorer than rim protector, and none backcourt of Edwards, Lee, Brown or Grigonis has ever been mistaken for a point-of-attack stopper. Coach Tomas Masiulis has a roster that, on paper, might be the best in Zalgiris history, but it’s built almost entirely around shot-making, not stops.
That means the defensive burden falls on everyone in the rotation. Zalgiris role players need to cover for two ball-dominant offensive centerpieces against a EuroLeague full of switchable, athletic wings. If Valanciunas and Edwards’ scoring can outpace what the team gives up defensively, Zalgiris could be a genuine surprise. If it can’t, this becomes a very entertaining team to watch lose close games.
