By Lefteris Moutis
Maccabi is by far the most … American team in Europe. But, can they really function as a NBA team? Their concentration was divided to four different targets (domestic League, domestic Cup, Adriatic League and Euroleague) from the beginning of current season and they were forced to change completely all their habits in order to survive all year long everything they had to do. They also differentiate themselves from the program of their competitors. A lot of travels, many more games and many players on and off, in order to withstand this frantic pace…
The lure of increased demands and earnings led Maccabi to return to Adriatic League after nine years, but without leaving Israel’s league, something Serbians, Croatians, Slovenians (etc.) Euroleague teams do each year. The result was an incredible burden of a huge number of games.
To understand exactly their needs, if Maccabi manages to reach Final Four of Euroleague and Adriatic League, their… speedometer will reach up to 86 games, four more than an NBA team, during a normal regular season. After their last game (before Euroleague’s play offs) they have allready played 63 games, 26 in Adriatic League, 18 in Israeli league, 16 in Euroleague and 3 in Israeli Cup. Panathinaikos number is 41 (16 in Euroleague, 22 in A1 and 3 for Greek Cup). Keep also in mind, till now Blatt’s players have something to do (a game to play) every 2.6 days!
Maccabi’s coach protested, saying that “we can’t prepare properly against Panathinaikos, because we have several consecutive difficult games until then”. His option to register in every Israeli’s championship game a different foreign roster, solved some problems, but the tiredness hasn’t decreased.
All the above plus Euroleague’s new schedule for next year (with +8 games) are enought reasons for Maccabi to withdraw from Adriatic League. And if we can understand one think, is that players and coaches will always have to decide about… how much they can endure, as normal human beings.