At the end of training on Yom Kippur, on Saturday night, Maccabi Tel Aviv began to think about how they could get Saivan Lee involved. Rokas Iukovaitis was injured, and Maccabi realized that without the new American guard who signed the day before, they might suffer a blow. Maccabi decided to go all out, and even at the cost of having a final training session after a very long trip to Belgrade on Monday, and at an unconventional time, they will make the effort to get Lee into action. And so, at night, I had my first training session in the hall where he starred just a week ago with Manisa in the Champions League. It paid off.
The group did not imagine how good Lee would be in his debut. They knew from what they saw when they decided to go after him with all their might, that he was a gifted scorer, but even there they did not expect that in his first Euroleague game he would simply be passionate at the level of controlling the game. And it wasn’t just points. Lee finished the game with 5 assists, including the game-winning assist, and was greeted with hugs and applause by his teammates.
As part of trying to get Lee into the team, the team’s players received him appreciatively. He received respect, which a player without Euroleague experience does not receive, and it turns out rightly so. “I told my family when he signed, that if he scores so much in the United States, and he’s able to score in the Champions League as well, then he can do it at this level as well. It’s a big performance by him, but I’m really not surprised,” said Jaylen Hurd .
One of the senior officials at Maccabi said last night that “this is one of the best debut performances we’ve had from a player, certainly from a player who arrived in the middle of a season, and there is no doubt that a player who did not train with us at all. A week ago, when it was clear to us that Jordan Lloyd wanted to leave and it would be difficult to keep him, he was here A state of general semi-depression, now we are on top of the world, let’s just hope it continues like this.” In the meantime, the team’s salespeople pulled out a 23 percent off sale in the middle of the night, like the points Lee scored, in the club’s 24-hour store, on his game jersey.
By the way, the club already knows that on Thursday against Partizan, the opposing team is expected to treat Lee differently, so that his next tests will be no less difficult.
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