Like I said in one of my recent blogs we had a real good week of practice, and that translated onto the court Saturday night. Before the game even started, our coach was stressing to us just how good of a start it would be to start the regular season with two road wins. It made sense, getting two road wins in this short 24 game season is huge, it gives you a leg up in the standings because it's way more difficult to win on the road than at home, and our guys responded very well to his message.
Unlike the first regular season game, we started out great. We were executing pretty well offensively, but that's not what was doing it for us. The way we were playing defensively, and the way we were controlling the glass is what took us out to our huge lead. We are a very big team, and when motivated, we don't get rebounded on. We were limiting them to one shot every time, and it was usually a bad one. Because of our great rebounding and defense we extended the lead early, and never looked back. We pushed the lead to twenty at half-time, and even had it to thirty at some stages of the third and fourth quarter. D-Jeff and BJ McKie led us in scoring with 20 points each, and Ido had a real nice game with 15. I got some time tonight, but most of it came in the second half when the game was already decided. Anyhow, I got my first two regular season points from the line in the 4th quarter, and I found my buddy Tal (the young dude) leakin' out late for a lay-up for his first bucket. Our backup PG Amit Ben-David did a real nice job tonight runnin' the show and filling in for Doron who didn't play that much, mainly because we were out to such an early lead, but also because he's still recovering from that accident earlier in the week.
Next week we play the defending champions for our home season opener. I have to imagine it's going to be pretty wild in there due to our very good start. That's all I got for now, and I will leave you with the final score from the gym last night.
Maccabi Haifa 81, Rishon Le'Zion 54
