Maccabi FOX Tel Aviv is ready to face Herbalife Gran Canaria. The yellows will play without DeAndre Kane who is still in states due to personal reasons. The crew in yellow and blue are not self dependent as there a few scenarios in which Maccabi can make it to the playoffs but one thing is for sure, they must win their remaining games starting tomorrow (Sport5, 21:00 local).
“Tomorrow we have the last regular home game of the regular season”, said Coach Giannis Sfairopoulos. “We hope that it will not be the last game of the season just the regular season, we will do our best although we need to count on other results but we’ll try to do our best in the last two gamedays starting from tomorrow’s game for our team. It’s very important to win the game, we want to win the game”.
“We play a team that changed their coach and in the last three games they have two wins, coach Sfairopoulos added. “They have a big and deep roster, they have a lot of players that they can change them and they use different lineups and starting fives and in general they are a team that have a lot of solutions, we need to play a very good defense and our job is to give information to our players about the individuals and a bout all the players that they have because each one of them is very important that’s why we need to know their personnel as best as we can, this is our job especially to scout them and guide how we need to defend them. For our offense we want to play as a best as we can. We expect our fans to come one more time to support us, our fans are a big weapon and they have big participation in all of our games here and also in away games and we want them one more time on our side to support us and also we want to have a good game to give them back for their support”.
“We’re approaching this game like we’re approaching every EuroLeague game”, said John DiBartolomeo. “We’re preparing, as long as have a chance for the playoffs we’re gonna play to get there and everyone is ready to come tomorrow to work. Every game has its pressure, as a competitor you want to win every game, obviously we need to fix some things that we didn’t do well at home and hopefully we’ll have a better outcome”.
“The whole team basically needs to be focused and do their job a 100%”, said Scottie Wilbekin. “That’s the only way the team can be playing at the top level the way we need to for 40 minutes. We need to win these couple of games and need that some stuff will happen. Every game has been difficult in the EuroLeague so I don’t expect it to be any different even though they don’t have the chance to advance pass these next two games. There’s added pressure because we want to get into the playoffs so bad and the window for doing that is getting smaller and smaller, there’s more outside stuff going on and we just have".