Maccabi Tel Aviv put 137 points on Bnei Herzliya on Monday night, eight players in double figures, the kind of scoreline a championship favorite runs up when it has stopped worrying about the regular season. Three days later, the same roster finds out what that depth is worth. A make-up game from Round 21 against Hapoel Tel Aviv, the only Israeli side to beat Maccabi in a derby this season, has turned into the last useful read either coach will get before the playoff brackets lock.
Thursday’s fixture is officially a postponed regular-season game. In practice it is a free dress rehearsal for the bracket, and the first meeting between the league’s top two clubs since Hapoel’s 99-88 Euroleague win over the same opponent in Belgrade last month.
The Make-Up Game Disguised as a Final Tune-Up
The league standings are already settled. Maccabi sit on a 24-1 record at the top, Hapoel on 21-4 in second, and neither needs the points. The seed maths are done, the home-court question answered. Yet both clubs are treating Thursday like a live-fire exercise rather than a closing-week formality.
Part of the reason is that they have not actually played each other in domestic competition during a competitive window in months. Their most recent meaningful collision came in Belgrade, where Maccabi continues to play its Euroleague home games because of the security situation in Israel. That match swung Hapoel into the European playoffs and gave Dimitris Itoudis a head-to-head data point his side can use to model what Oded Katash adjusts in a knockout setting.
Katash kept his roster on the gas anyway. Tamir Blatt opened the Herzliya rout with five three-pointers in the first quarter, the kind of opening barrage that does not happen by accident with three days until a derby. By halftime Maccabi led 67-36; by the end of the third quarter it was 108-50.
This was a good game that we began properly from both sides of the court. We didn’t expect to win by this gap but we are really playing and doing things well ahead of the playoffs. The Israeli league is different than the Euroleague, and we are really getting into that groove.
That was Katash after the final buzzer, and the line that matters in it is the second one. Maccabi’s domestic form has been the cleanest part of an otherwise nomadic season.
Maccabi’s Depth Chart Has Cleared in Time
The 62-point margin is a number worth squinting at, because it landed on a night Katash got bodies back. Gur Lavy returned from injury. Lonnie Walker, the team’s American import, returned from injury. David Efianayi, a new signing, made his yellow-and-blue debut. None of them looked rusty enough to worry about.
Iffe Lundberg and Will Rayman finished with 15 points apiece, Lavy added 16, Blatt led the way with 17, and the bench did the rest. The list of contributors in double figures is the genuine headline:
- Tamir Blatt, point guard, 17 points, five first-quarter threes
- Gur Lavy, returning forward, 16 points in his first game back
- Iffe Lundberg, combo guard, 15 points
- Will Rayman, wing, 15 points
- Lonnie Walker, returning American guard, scoring on his first night back
- David Efianayi, debutant, hit from deep
- Jaylen Hoard, frontcourt, second-quarter scoring run
- John DiBartolomeo, veteran guard, third-quarter pressure
Lavy himself made the depth case as clearly as anyone could. “The staff did a great job to get me back to action,” he said in the locker room. “We have a lot of depth and we will be ready for the playoffs.” TJ Leaf, the stretch four whose absence had bothered Katash’s rotations for weeks, is the only remaining body the coach is still managing into the bracket.
For a team that has spent most of its Euroleague season living out of hotel rooms, that is the version of the roster Maccabi has been waiting for since autumn. The official Maccabi Rapyd Tel Aviv Euroleague page still lists a rotation built on imports; the version that took the floor against Herzliya leaned heavily on Israeli scoring, which is the rotation Katash actually needs for a domestic playoff run.
Hapoel’s 81-75 Grind Tells Its Own Story
Across town, Hapoel won by six. Ish Wainright dropped six three-pointers and 18 points, Yam Madar added 13, Levi Randolph chipped in 11, and the road trip to Ness Ziona came down to a final-quarter push. Bryce Brown answered with 23 for the hosts; James Akinjo had 15. It read like a playoff game already.
That is partly because it almost was one. Ness Ziona, sitting tenth on a 9-16 record, needed the result to lock down a playoff spot under the league’s expanded eight-team bracket. They got the seed by losing close, which is the kind of evening the bottom of the table is built around in May.
For Hapoel, the value of the night was the lack of waste. Itoudis came in with what he called “quite a few issues” and walked out with a win that read as professional even if it never felt comfortable. Wainright pointed at the atmosphere, calling the return to playing in front of Israeli crowds the part of the season he was happiest about. Both quotes are easy to dismiss as locker-room boilerplate. They become more interesting when set against the score: a six-point margin against the league’s tenth-best team, played the same week Maccabi was winning by sixty.
The takeaway is not that Hapoel are worse. It is that the two clubs are arriving at the bracket from very different directions. One is finally healthy and rolling its bench. The other has been winning by holding its nerve in close games for most of the spring.
The League Table Before the Bracket Locks
The Israeli Basketball Premier League rewrote its postseason format mid-year. After conflict-driven schedule disruptions in March, the play-in stage was scrapped, the top eight teams now go straight into the playoffs, and quarterfinals were trimmed to a best-of-three. Semifinals and finals remain best-of-five.
That trim matters. A best-of-three quarterfinal removes a margin for error a higher seed used to enjoy, which is why both Tel Aviv coaches are using Thursday to look at lineups they may need on opening night.
The top of the standings sits like this heading into the final regular-season week:
| Seed | Club | Record | Quarterfinal Matchup |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maccabi Tel Aviv | 24-1 | vs. 8th seed |
| 2 | Hapoel Tel Aviv | 21-4 | vs. Maccabi Rishon LeZion |
| 3 | Bnei Herzliya | 18-8 | vs. 6th seed |
| 4 | Hapoel Jerusalem | 17-8 | vs. 5th seed |
| 5 | Hapoel Holon | 15-11 | vs. Hapoel Jerusalem |
| 6 | Hapoel HaEmek | 15-10 | vs. Bnei Herzliya |
| 7 | Maccabi Rishon LeZion | 12-14 | vs. Hapoel Tel Aviv |
Maccabi Rishon LeZion booked their bracket place with a 93-78 win over Maccabi Ra’anana, the Wine City club pulling away in the second half behind 20 points from Josh Freund and 16 from Chaunce Jenkins. Matt Coleman’s 19 for Ra’anana was not enough. Guy Kaplan’s side will now be the first opponent Itoudis sees in a knockout series.
For Maccabi, the eighth-seed opponent remains unconfirmed pending the final round. Either way, the seeding question that Thursday’s derby is most likely to decide is psychological: which side enters Game One of its quarterfinal believing the other one is beatable.
Galil Elyon Plays Through the Loss of Raz Adam
The basketball details sit underneath a much harder week for the league. Raz Adam, captain of Hapoel Galil Elyon, died in a car crash on Route 90 last Wednesday on the way to a team dinner. He was 26.
Adam was one of the most decorated Israeli players of his generation at youth level. He won back-to-back Under-20 European Championship golds with Israel alongside Deni Avdija, the now-NBA forward, and was named the National League’s Breakthrough Player of the Year in 2019-20. He debuted for the senior national team in a EuroBasket qualifier against Slovenia. His club, sitting twelfth on a 7-19 record, will not be in the playoffs.
The condolences across the league were uniform and sincere. Itoudis opened his post-game press conference with them. Wainright followed. Lavy used part of his own injury-return interview to talk about Adam first, before he talked about basketball.
I want to talk about Raz Adam and how much we will miss him. The staff did a great job to get me back to action. We have a lot of depth and we will be ready for the playoffs.
Ynet’s Hebrew sports desk reported the crash details, and the Jerusalem Post’s first report on the accident carried the team’s official statement. A 39-year-old driver in the second vehicle was lightly injured and taken to Ziv Medical Center in Safed. Adam was pronounced dead at the scene.
What the Derby Tells Coaches Before Game One
Three things are worth tracking when the ball goes up at Menora Mivtachim Arena on Thursday, and they all double as playoff diagnostics.
The first is Walker’s minutes. The American guard played his first game back against Herzliya and the gap was wide enough that nobody really had to test him. A derby pace against an Itoudis defense is the actual test, and the minutes load Katash gives him will say more about how Maccabi plans its opening series rotation than any pre-playoff press conference will.
The second is whether Hapoel’s defensive identity travels. Itoudis has built a side that wins close games by squeezing scoring rates in the fourth quarter, which is what beat Ness Ziona and what beat Maccabi in Belgrade. Maccabi’s 137 against Herzliya came partly because Herzliya did not have an answer for the three-point barrage. Hapoel does. Whether they choose to expend the energy in a regular-season makeup is the coaching decision worth watching.
The third is the bench depth gap. Eight Maccabi players scored in double figures on Monday. Hapoel’s three-man scoring core of Wainright, Madar and Randolph carried most of the load against Ness Ziona. If the quarterfinal rotations compress in a best-of-three, the deeper bench wins more nights than not. If they expand, the top-three scoring punch travels better.
If Thursday confirms Maccabi’s depth advantage on a healthy roster, the rest of the league reads as a coronation waiting for the calendar. If Hapoel finds a way to keep the score in the seventies and impose Itoudis’s defensive shape on a side missing nobody, the bracket gets a lot more interesting than the standings suggest.
