Maccabi’s head coach Giannis Sfairopoulos’ after the 81:76 home win: we did a great job defensively keeping them in our bad moments of the game with 37 points”. Jake Cohen: “It was a whole team effort today”
“This is our biggest win so far from the moment I came to Maccabi because as I said this game is
a dangerous“, said Coach Sfairopoulos. “They changed three players and they changed a coach and played without pressure, this was a must win game for us and we knew we had to win it gave us nervousness in the first half we missed open shots and layups, on offense we didn’t work with patience to read the defense and to play smart, and this nervousness hurt our confidence offensively”.“The good thing is except Cole who scored 18 points in the first half we did a great job defensively keeping them in our bad moments of the game with 37 points, comparing to the previous four games that we were not good defensively”, Coach Giannis added. “In the second half we played much better, we stopped Norris on 7 points in the second half, we scored 47 points and kept them on low scoring. I want to congratulate all the players that participated everybody helped for this win, I’m happy with how we played defense and showed character”.
“We played really well together as a team especially on the defensive end”, said Cohen. “We didn’t get some shots to fall especially in the first half we got a lot of great looks, but we got stops and that’s something we haven’t been doing lately a lot of teams have been scoring 90 points on us and we buckled down tonight and we got stops when it counted and we pulled away at the fourth quarter it was a whole team effort today”.
“Credit to our defense in the second half”, said Kendrick Ray. “We came out with more energy on the defensive end and it helped us on offense. Coach told us in the first half that we relying too much on our threes and go inside and try to get some two pointers and it worked for us”.
