A new season, a new team

A new season began last night in the Euroleague Basketball Tournament and Maccabi Tel Aviv opened that season with a new team. It used to be that each season Maccabi would keep the core of its team, replacing two or three players with names new to Europe, but in the past few years that tradition has no longer been maintained. 

From last year's team, only three Israelis and one American remain; the rest have gone due to retirement (two), enticement by larger contracts (two) or simply let go (two). As a result, an almost completely new team has been constructed this summer - I don't write 'built' for the players have yet to coalesce into a whole, the team has yet to be built. And of these new players, whilst some are new to Europe, there are two who played for other teams in the Euroleague last year whilst at least one other played in a lower grade European tournament. As it happens, the American who remains from last year underwent an operation in the summer and has yet to make an appearance in any of the practice games. Thus Maccabi opened last night with four players who I've never seen before; unsurprisingly, the three Israelis made very important contributions.

These constant changes, including faces who last year were opponents, makes building a team identity very difficult. Of course, there are problems on the professional side but I'm not really writing about that but rather about the difficulty of an average fan to identify with his team. As I have written before, I am an armchair fan of Maccabi and there have been times when I have preferred to spend my Thursday evenings doing something else than watching an Israeli team being taken apart. But on the whole, Maccabi manages to supply teams whose performance exceeds what one might expect from their dry statistics, and these performances can bring a little joy into my life.

As per last the last few seasons, Maccabi opened with an away game in Spain (Malaga), but this time managed to win the game; towards the end of the first half, they even had a 16 or 18 point lead, which unfortunately evaporated in the third quarter, only to be partially restored in the final quarter. Such is the nature of the early stages of the tournament that this away win may be enough to secure Maccabi the first place in their group: most of the other teams (bar Malaga) are minnows and Maccabi will be expected to beat them. Thus beating the strongest other team in the group in an away game will be the 'something extra' needed in order to achieve first place. 

But this year, the structure of the Euroleague top 16 stage has been changed, adding more games; thus finishing first in the first stage has less meaning this year than it has done in previous years.

Don't worry: this is not going to turn into a sporting blog; I doubt that I will have any more to write about Maccabi for the next few months.