{"id":502360,"date":"2018-08-19T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-19T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8080\/spahija-we-did-a-good-job-with-the-roster\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T10:18:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T07:18:15","slug":"spahija-we-did-a-good-job-with-the-roster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/spahija-we-did-a-good-job-with-the-roster\/","title":{"rendered":"Spahija: &#8220;We did a good job with the roster&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"responsive-video-container\" style=\"position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; margin-bottom: 20px;\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EIaHXlejcQs\" style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div style=\"direction: ltr;\">\n<div> \t\t<span style=\"font-size:14px;\">Neven Spahija, head coach of Maccabi FOX Tel Aviv, came back to Israel after the off-season break during which he managed to work with his staff on this year&#8217;s roster, attend the summer league in Las Vegas and watch his national team reaching the world cup finals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p> \t\t<span style=\"font-size: 14px;\">&#8220;I think we did a good job with the roster, but at the end of the day the chemistry between the players is the most important thing&#8221;, said coach Spahija after landing in Ben Gurion International Airport. &#8220;It&#8217;s something we need to work on in practice, to play and work together, it&#8217;s still too early to talk about it&#8221;.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div> \t\t<span style=\"font-size: 14px;\">&#8220;Last here I arrived after 3 years of bad results, and we had to rebuild&#8221;, coach Spahija reminded. &#8220;We replaced 12 players, which is uncommon for a EuroLeague team. I really can&#8217;t remember that such thing happened in modern basketball. The first year after making such a move you can&#8217;t achieve it all. But even after making this move we proved that we can compete in the highest levels. We brought back the championship, unfortunately we didn&#8217;t win the cup&#8221;.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div> \t\t<span style=\"font-size: 14px;\">&#8220;The most important thing for me is that we didn&#8217;t have to replace 12 players, we replaced 5-6 and this means that we kept the core of the team&#8221;, coach Spahija emphasized about the roster. &#8220;This summer we added some players with a serious reputation and to my opinion we did a good job. Now it all depends on chemistry and the way that we will play not on the signings&#8221;.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div> \t\t<span style=\"font-size: 14px;\">&#8220;We are now 6 days before our first practice, it&#8217;s hard to know what do we need to do better&#8221;, coach answered regarding the conclusions from last season. &#8220;What do we want to do better? There are a lot of things: to play better defense, to qualify to the EuroLeague playoffs, to win the cup again. We&#8217;ve added new players to the existing core and now we have to see how things will go&#8221;.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div> \t\t<span style=\"font-size: 14px;\">Regarding the off-season, coach told Maccabi&#8217;s official website: &#8220;It was a great summer. I think that two months was enough time to rest, to relax and to comeback with the energies needed&#8221;. When asked about the Croatian national team in the world cup coach said: &#8220;I\u2019m not disappointed. I hope that everyone saw the celebrations in Zagreb&#8217;s central square. We&#8217;re all very proud to finish as the runner ups in the world cup. Now everybody knows who Croatia is&#8221;.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<div> \t\t<span style=\"font-size: 14px;\">About coming back to Israel coach Spahija said: &#8220;I&#8217;ve missed a lot of things, mostly to our fans&#8221;.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maccabi&#8217;s head coach Neven Spahija came back to Israel after the off-season break: &#8220;We kept the core of the team and added players with reputation&#8221;. Coach added: &#8220;Mostly I&#8217;ve missed our fans&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":502358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"custom_author":[],"class_list":["post-502360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-54"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502360","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=502360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":502362,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502360\/revisions\/502362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502360"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=502360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}