Forgetfulness disease. Yigal Alon once said: “A nation that does not know its past – its present is poor and its future is full of fog.” Maccabi Tel Aviv has adopted a new mantra this season: to immediately forget about the game that has just ended, regardless of its result, because the next game is already around the corner. What is interesting is whether Maccabi expresses this only outwardly, or whether Yannis Sapropoulos and his team really do not want to mess In a game that has just ended? To learn from it? To analyze it? To draw conclusions from it?
Probably from a game like this, that for the umpteenth time, Maccabi loses after a close battle, this time 89:87 to Olympiacos. When we asked Metropoulos to put his finger on a mental or professional factor that makes it difficult for the players to deliver the goods in Money Time, he replied briefly: “We have no mental or professional problem. I do not want to analyze the game, I will do it with my players and not you journalists. I will tell them “Directly what I want to get better, this is not the time to take it out. We have to learn from the mistakes we made and try to get better.”
So if “we are the journalists” we analyze the words of Sapropolus – if this is not a mental problem, nor a professional problem, then where is the problem? Do the players not follow the coach’s instructions? Or maybe the problem is really on the lines, where wrong decisions are made at the moment of the decision? Notice what Othello Hunter said at the end: “It was a close battle, we could have won. With some of the moves I did not agree. What does not work for us in close games? This is a good question. Lots of losses, a lot of lack of concentration. At the end of the day some win and lose “Some of the games. The main thing is that we will continue to fight and we will not give up, there are more games ahead of us and most importantly we will continue to improve so that we are ready to fight for a place in the playoffs.”
Live another day. “We’ll live and die with Scotty Wilbkin,” Sapropoulos said after one of the games, and yesterday he tasted, again, the least positive part of that sentence. For the tenth time this season, Maccabi lost when Wilbkin leads the list of scenes, and yesterday he added a negative club record in losses per player in a single game, with 8 such – the highest since the Euroleague format in 2000.
However, Yannis repelled the criticism: “I like my players and I do not judge them if they have a bad game. Olympiacos in the second half loaded the color, changed the defense and did not let us throw from the inside. We were given free throws from the outside that we could score, but sometimes “When you are completely free and you miss 4-5 shots, you go into pressure on defense and attack. We did a good job of finding free players and moving the ball, we missed a few moves and when you lose in overtime it means the game was open to both sides. Small details prevailed.”
The Israelis Party. We stopped counting the minutes of the game or the points of the Israeli players at Maccabi for a long time – and it’s good that way, but yesterday the negative statistics cried out to the sky: In 27 minutes together, all the Maccabi Israelis provided one single point (laser, from the line), 3 rebounds And a cumulative negative index of minus 8.
Sapropoulos talked a lot this season about hoping everyone would recover from the injuries, but yesterday, with a full squad, John Dibertolomeo was sent to the floor for just 10 seconds, Blazer got 3 minutes, Caspi failed to stand out in 13 minutes and Yuval Sussman again begged for balls. For 21 minutes, without success.
Tyler Dorsey, who maintains stability by being unstable, was aware of the 10 points Maccabi left on the line, compared to only 4 of the Greeks: “We missed a lot of free throws, including me, and we must improve. It is another hard loss for us. This is life, not all. “A day is successful. Personally, I have to score my shots and put the pressure on myself, I will have to get better and work on my consistency.”
