Maybe it’s not the most skilled team in Europe, and Nokia Arena already saw better teams than that, but that is water under the bridge now. After a one year break Maccabi Tel Aviv is back in the finals of the Euroleague. Almost like in every game this year it went the hard way but a huge come back in the second quarter put Maccabi 92-85 on top of Montepaschi of Italy.<\/P>
Zvika Sherf: “Nothing is expected with this team. We had a terrible start, we got better in the second quarter while in the second half we did a great job. Lots of things in basketball stay unexplainable. We were very heavy in the first quarter and didn’t do any of the things we planned ahead. We moved to our third and fourth back-up plans and played with a line-up we’re not used to play with. My players were with their heads down at half time, but I told them it’s just 12 points and there are still 20 minutes to play.” “When we took the first lead I followed the Italian bench and players and I saw something changed in the big confidence they had. When we took the lead it was very difficult for them to come back. The night before the game I had a talk with Lior Eliyahu and I told him to be mentally ready to play. I took him out because the game became aggressive and that’s something he doesn’t have now. When something works you stay with it and the most important thing now is that we won the game. <\/P>
“We started the game very tensed,” said Terence Morris who didn’t have a great day this time. “We loosened up as the game went along and in the fourth quarter we showed our aggressiveness that was worth the win.” <\/P>
Nikola Vujcic: “It’s an unbelievable feeling that I can’t describe. It was amazing to win this game. Derrick and Sharp were amazing and so did Alex. The most important thing is that we won and play in the finals. I don’t care who we play there. Anyhow it will be a difficult game.” <\/P>
Sharp: “I think the last time I actually played was the 8th of March against Holon but I worked hard to keep in good shape and have my body ready because you can never know when you’ll get a chance. It was important to believe and when I took the court I just did what I know best to do. The guys calmed down at half time after the good second quarter and our energy was very high. When we started to do the things we know doing best the numbers evened and we got the win.” <\/P>
Alex Garcia: “I came focused to the game hoping to help my team in defense, and I ended up helping also on offense. I spoke with my wife this morning and got ready for the game. I didn’t plan it will turn out to be like that but I’m just happy we won the game. I was hoping that’s how things will happen. It was difficult for me to sleep at night. <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The veteran captain in a huge game concluded: “It was important to keep believing in myself, and then I came on the floor and did what I know to do best.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"custom_author":[],"class_list":["post-27656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":494493,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27656\/revisions\/494493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27656"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=27656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}