Maccabi Tel Aviv Fears Injury to Tamir Blatt

Maccabi Tel Aviv is 40 minutes away from reaching a fourth straight playoff final after beating Hapoel Holon 84:74 tonight and taking a 2:0 lead in the semifinal series. Game 3 will be played already tomorrow afternoon, and the tight schedule could hurt the Yellow and Blue, who lost Tamir Blatt during the game to a calf muscle injury. The club hopes Blatt will be able to return this season, and he will be examined within the next 24 hours to determine the severity of the injury.

Loni Walker was not registered for the game, as he also did not arrive, as recalled, for the first game of the series. This time he sat in the stands with the other players who were not included in the roster, despite having taken part in a full practice with the team two days ago. Oded Katash chose to register Oshae Brissett in his place, and Brissett finished one rebound short of a double-double with an efficient night of 13 points and 9 rebounds.

But above all stood Jaylen Hoard. The Maccabi Tel Aviv forward produced one of his best games of the season, scoring 30 points and adding 15 rebounds in 30 minutes on the floor. Maccabi’s control in the paint and on the boards was complete, with the Yellow and Blue grabbing 21 offensive rebounds compared with just nine for Holon. “I tried to be aggressive, that’s been my focus since the start of the playoffs, to try to help the team go as far as possible,” Hoard said afterward. “Everyone tried to get me into rhythm, and that helped me a lot. I’m happy I had a good game. I’m not sure what happened. I had ups and downs, you can’t always be aggressive, but I try. I know that when I’m aggressive, I have good games. That’s my focus, that’s something I’m trying to improve, consistency.” Katash also praised his player: “Jaylen was tremendous, I’m happy for him. In recent games he has been better and more assertive. We are getting more from him. His points and the things he did come from the way we play. I’m very happy and proud of the way we played. We did things even when we were not at our best from three, and we struggled offensively from the moment Tamir was injured. We missed him, but also a guard who can share the minutes and the load. Our defensive minutes won us the game, we controlled the rebounds, and that is a key weapon for us.”

Katash also expanded on the state of the roster at the decisive stage of the season: “We don’t have too many solutions. It’s a great deal of bad luck. We didn’t arrive in an ideal state in terms of injuries, not in an optimal state for the playoffs. We need to pray that Tamir’s injury is not too serious. Jimmy Clark was already at the stage where I could have registered him for the game today, we got that approval, but I was afraid to risk him. We will need him for the next game. We trust Oshae. He had knee problems at the start of the playoffs, and it’s hard to get the rhythm back immediately, that doesn’t happen. Maybe this game will help him shake off the rust. His contribution is not only in the points he gets on the other end, Holon knows the final score is somewhat misleading. For most of the night the difference in quality was very clear. Even after the purple side recovered from a particularly poor first quarter, in which it scored only nine points, Maccabi knew how to open the gap again, reaching more than 20 points at its peak.

At the end of the game there was an incident between Natanel Artzi and fans sitting near the tunnel. The fans cursed at the Holon captain, and he responded to them in words. At one point Artzi was not far from climbing into the stands himself. Afterwards he did not return to the locker room and remained sitting for a few minutes on the other side of the arena. A team official who saw the incident did not hide his disappointment that tempers flared דווקא in what was apparently Holon’s last home game of the season. “It was very emotional,” said the official.

Either way, Predrag Krunic and his players will arrive at the arena tomorrow knowing the chances of dragging the series to a fourth game are very slim. “I would have been happier to talk more if we had won, Maccabi deserved to win,” said the Serbian coach. “We played better defense than in the first game, but offensively we were not good enough. On the boards they dominated, and we did not grab enough defensive rebounds to generate transition offense. Maccabi is a very big team, they have big players at every position. We knew that and talked about it as a key. We were solid in that in the first game, and today we were not good. That was something that was very hard for us, we did not get enough rebounds and we did not box out well.”