1. Half a minute to the end of last night’s (Tuesday) 93:81 loss to Paris in basketball, Rokas Iukovaitis threw a ball towards the stands after a stepping violation was whistled against him. That step of frustration symbolizes in a small way the anger felt by the Maccabi Tel Aviv players at the end of the loss in Belgrade. Mainly angry at themselves, in a game that could have brought them back to the play-in fight in the Euroleague and put part of the weak start of the season behind them, but ended completely differently.
The Yellows chased Paris from the beginning of the second quarter, which Maccabi entered only trailing by 4. At this point, Paris began to shoot three-pointers without recognition, Maccabi found no solutions, and the gap increased to 21 during the third quarter. The Yellows further lowered the margin to 8, were several times close to shrinking the margin maybe more, but every time they got closer, they made a defensive mistake, and saw Paris run away again.
Five players scored in double figures at Maccabi, but it is difficult to point to a player who can leave the game with a good feeling. Tamir Blat returned from injury and in 16 and a half minutes did not score a field goal and finished with 3 points along with 7 assists. Leway Randolph was the leading scorer with 14 points and 5 rebounds.
“We have to keep fighting and try to improve. We had a better second half than the first half, we’ll try to pull the momentum into the next game. We have to stay together,” Randolph said at the end. Captain John DiBartholomew said: “We need to focus now on Barcelona, it was a tough loss because we didn’t play our best basketball for 40 minutes, but we have to give them credit. We’ll move on to the next game, because it’s the most important one now.”
During the game, Maccabi held a tribute to kidnap Alon Ehel who was kidnapped from the death penalty after escaping from the Nova Party. Ehal holds Israeli and Serbian citizenship. Chairman Shimon Mizrahi took a picture with his parents together with the shirt with the number 423, the number of days that Alon has been in captivity, and the team’s players signed the shirt at the end of the game.
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