After 27 long games Maccabi Elite Tel Aviv finished the regular season with a road win at Rishon Lezion that had more of a key moral impact than anything else. Batista and Bynum stayed home due to illness and without them Terence Morris, Vonteego Cummings and Alex Garcia in a huge fourth quarter decided the game in favor of Maccabi.
This was the last game of Rishon in this gym, and the game started with a ceremony to honor the club’s greatest players. Shimon Mizrakhi, Zvika Sherf and Guy Goodess also took part in that ceremony and were accepted in cheers.
Rishon took an early 9-4 lead and after Cedric Banks hit twice from long range it extended to 15-8. Cummings replied with two hits of his own as Maccabi took the lead and finished the first quarter up 22-23.
A 0-6 run early in the second gave Maccabi a 22-29 lead, but Yoni Nir showed big heart and Rishon was back in the game. The lead changed hands until the teams hit the halftime break tied at 42-42.
Both teams weren’t focused in the early minutes of the second half. None was able to make a run as the lead continued to move from one side to the other. Bluthenthal hit from long range, Yotam Halperin showed his skills but Maccabi held just a 65-66 lead after 30 minutes of game.
Morris with a big dunk started the last quarter but it took a few more minutes before the champs took off. In charge of the run was Alex Garcia, who scored 10 points in a row and 13 out of his 15 in the last quarter. Maccabi climbed to a nine point lead, 76-85 and from there Rishon couldn’t come back.
Maccabi: Morris 18 (10 rbs), Halperin 17 (7 as), Vujcic 16, Garcia 15, Cummings 13 (8 as), Bluthenthal 11, Casspi 4
Rishon: Banks 17, Blessingame 13, Kurtz 11, Sha’ashoua 11, Nir 8, Lev 8, Sneed 7, Farkhi 5, Markson 2
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A great offensive display brought Maccabi an 82-94 road win at Rishon Lezion on the last game of the regular season. Will Bynum and Esteban Batista didn’t play due to illness<\/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-27717","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\/27717","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=27717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":494524,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27717\/revisions\/494524"}],"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=27717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27717"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=27717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}