Even in the fifth attempt, Maccabi Tel Aviv failed to achieve an away victory – and is still the only team in the Euroleague that has not yet done so. Yesterday (Friday) they surrendered to Bayern Munich 98:89, and for the first time this season dropped to a negative balance in the Euroleague of 6:5, when this loss may yet turn out to be a kind of watershed in Maccabi Tel Aviv’s season.
Within the club there is dissatisfaction with how the team looks, mainly due to the fact that it is difficult to identify an improvement graph, especially at the defensive level. The status of Oded Ketch is on the agenda, but at Maccabi a decision has not yet been made as there is no consensus one way or the other within the management.
While some members of the board believe that the shake-up is necessary, there are quite a few voices who believe that more time should be given, and that the existing material – coach and playing staff – can turn this season around. Currently, it seems that Ketch will get more time, and he will be on the lines against Valencia and probably also in the double Italian week after that, against Milan and Bologna.
The dissatisfaction of the Maccabi Tel Aviv team with the team did not start yesterday. Maccabi are disappointed because they have felt for some time that this squad is worth more than its results, and especially worth more than the level of basketball it presents. At Maccabi they are putting at stake all the mitigating circumstances of a newly built team From zero – even though there were a number of particularly impressive victories (Monaco, Olympiakos) – but on balance, the management does not like what they see.
Maccabi Tel Aviv feels that many players are not reaching their potential, some have lost confidence, some transmit bad body language – when at the end of the day, one thing leads to another. As evidence, last week one of the management had a special conversation with all the players, in which the main message conveyed was that players need to understand where they are and improve the general attitude. “It happens that one player loses confidence or another player is in a bad time, but if there are several such cases at the same time, there is probably a problem,” said the team.
Speaking of problems. A prominent short in the media came out this week, when Maccabi decided to suspend Darren Hilliard based on tweets that were perceived as critical of Ketch. Maccabi’s decision to suspend Hilliard was of course a club decision – both staff and management – but the very fact that one of the players in the squad feels and expresses himself this way lit a number of red lights within the club, as far as the management of the squad is concerned. As of right now, by the way, it is still unclear when, or if at all, Hilliard will return to the staff.
Yesterday’s game was no different from most of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s away games this season. Not bad offense, even good for large parts of the time, but catastrophic defense. Yesterday, the Yellows met one of the worst offensive teams in the Euroleague, one that until yesterday scored a little more than 73 points on average per game. Yesterday, and without the excellent Vladimir Lucic, Bayern scored 25 points more than their average.
“If we had been able to make some stops on defense it could have been a game after all,” said Jaylen Adams, who had his best game since coming in with 20 points. “Every time we got close to them, we weren’t focused enough on defense in one, two possessions and that’s where we lost it.”
It happened to Maccabi Tel Aviv against Baskonia, it happened to them against Partizan Belgrade and it happened to them yesterday. They just can’t make any kind of defensive step-up, and yesterday the defensive rebound problem also returned in a big way: Bayern took 14 offensive rebounds, which translated into 21 points And in a game that ends with a double-digit margin, that’s the big difference.
“We were there, the whole time we were close, but the problem was that we had some moments where we fell,” said Alex Poithers. “Even though we were missing two significant players, we played solid throughout most of the game, but we weren’t able to make several consecutive stops. They scored their shots, but we fought the whole time and that’s important.”
Of course the loss is the one that determines the narrative of the game but it was impossible to ignore the huge performance of Lorenzo Brown yesterday, for moments it seemed as if he would have to win this game alone. The center of Maccabi Tel Aviv had 36 points (12 of 16 from the field), one point less than the club’s Euroleague record shared by Ronas Yasikvicius and Scotty Wilvkin, along with 7 assists, 8 turnovers and a monstrous index of 43.
It’s not that anyone in Maccabi Tel Aviv needed yesterday’s performance to understand that this is one of the club’s best signings in recent years, but the fact that the team is so dependent on him is what worries the Yellows. Can,” Maccabi said. “The problem is that sometimes he is the entire attack, and in the end it’s hard to win with just one player, no matter how good he is.”
On a different topic, but just as important as basketball. On the morning of the game, the Maccabi Tel Aviv players visited the commemoration site for the 11 martyrs of Munich. Maccabi took part in a series of official events, in the capacity of the Consul General of Israel in Berlin, Carmela Shamir, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Olympic Games in Munich and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes.
The events took place as part of the “One Team – One People” project, an initiative that works to promote sports as a tool to combat anti-Semitism and hatred, and to strengthen the relationship between Israel and the Jewish communities in Europe through the games of Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Euroleague. The 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered at the Munich Games in 1972, when in addition, the members of the Maccabi delegation and the Center for Jewish Impact conducted a tour of the Dachau concentration camp, where the members of the delegation and a survivor of the Holocaust placed an Aba Nour zar in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
Adli Markhos, CEO of Maccabi Tel Aviv, said: “We have a moral obligation to maintain this type of cooperation continuously. We must not rest even for a moment. To strengthen the Jewish communities in Europe in particular and in the whole world in general, to work tirelessly to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust and to come out demonstrably against the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.”
Doron Gemchi, VP of Marketing and Sales, concluded: “Of course, 50 years after the assassination of the Jewish People, the importance of our visit here in Munich is even greater. We are aware of what is happening. Hate crimes are on the rise all over the world, and anti-Semitism is on the rise . Sports is a first-class tool to fight these phenomena.”
