Maccabi Haifa 97, Hapoel Be'eri 51

As I had told you all, today was our first cup game.  To clarify, the 'cup' and the 'season' are two different things, but they go on at the same time.  Basically speaking, the 'cup' is a tournament (still not sure if it's single elimination or not) and the 'cup' games are played on weeknights, so they don't interfere with the 'season' schedule (only one game a week, every Sunday).  Anyhow, every first division team starts the 'cup' tourney with a second division team at their gym.  They do it like that to give the second division team some sort of fighting chance to pull off an upset, and apparently for the past few years, there has been at least one or two upsets in every year.  Fortunately for us, no upset occured...nor was it even close.  We bussed down south  to the city  Ashkelon at 10am, ate lunch when we arrived there at 1pm, and then had a couple hours of rest in a hotel, before traveling 30 minutes to the gym in Be'eri.  As I said yesterday this town is located way too close to the Gaza Strip for anyone's liking.  I would have preferred to play in the North for my first ever game in Israel, because I didn't like the idea of a rocket hitting the gym during warmups, but unfortunately for me, I don't make the schedule.  

As for the game, We starting bombing away early and...ummm, lemme try that again, we started out hitting all our deep targets...uhhh, neither of those are probably the most appropriate considering where we played the game.  What I am trying to say is that we shot the hell out of the basketball, and really shared the ball well against their weak zone defense.  We took a big lead early into half time, I think we were up by 20 or so, and in the 2nd half we really clicked offensively, hitting 10 threes, after hitting 6 in the first.  I gotta give my Player of the Game award to Gur Porat, our backup 3-man who was strokin' it from deep.  I am pretty sure he finished the game with 6 threes, and had about 24 points (I forget to check him on the box score, so I can't say for sure).  As for myself, I played by far my best game since I've been over here.  I hit my first three point attempt in the first half, and that really gave me the confidence to get it going for the rest of the night.  I finished with a new Israeli career high with 11 points (4-5 fg, 3-4 3pt fg), 4 assists, 2 rebounds, 1 steal, and 1 Turnover, in 20 minutes.  Hopefully I can carry this over to Sunday when we start the season at Ramat Gan.  I'll be up late tonight considering it's already 1am, and I got the World Series game starting at 2am... it don't get much better than a W on the court, and a little baseball on the TV... 

Also, I'ma try to put some pictures up a bit later, but it's not workin right now, so I will see what I can do.