Maccabi Tel Aviv players celebrate with Oded Ketch the qualification for the quarterfinals/Maccabi Tel Aviv's official website
"When I come to a decisive game, I will always want Lorenzo Brown to be on my side. It is a privilege to coach him. He is a great player, a player of great games and one of our leaders - even when he is in a less good time. We trust him. He is good enough to get himself out of situations I was a player too, and I got to go through talented players - not always like him - who experienced similar situations, we will need him.
"He had an injury that took him off the pace. He needs a good few minutes to recover. Basketball is a team game made up of individuals, and we have to find the way to play correctly. Lorenzo draws attention from the opponent, he is important to us, and we have to make sure he is the best. When you look at a whole season, you have to remember the whole package. In our most difficult time, when Wade Baldwin was missing, he was amazing. The players, the team and I have not lost faith in him, and we feel that he is getting back to his rhythm."
(Oded Ketch, April 2024, not on a specific day)
The average basketball fan expects certain things from his coach. That he put on a show, scream at the players, make movements towards the stands, fly Oded Ketch doesn't do any of these things. When Maccabi Tel Aviv is in a crisis, he stands with freezing coldness, with his hands folded on his hips, with a penetrating look, and walks in his characteristic silence Speaks quietly, doesn't curse, and gives pointed and matter-of-fact instructions.
Some people perceive this behavior as indifference and
indifference mistake.
Ketch is not only a basketball genius, who perfected and developed the pick-and-roll attack into a complete theory taught in training courses around the world, but also a person with a high level of emotional intelligence. We wrote this before, Baldwin said it recently in his voice, and the attack of the caps during the celebrations last night (Tuesday) in the dressing room in Belgrade proved it: in the unimaginable situation that Maccabi found itself in this season, it needed a coach "of players", who would make them love him and rally for him and for themselves , and he certainly won't show up to training sessions and games in a foreign country without an audience with a sullen face, a throat snoring from shouting and an attitude full of distance that could break up the delicate mix.
The last week drained into it the essence of Maccabi Tel Aviv Model 2024: apparently, it had three home games in five days - in the last cycle in the Euroleague, the Premier League and Playin. Only that between each game she had to fly from Belgrade and back, in the middle she went through the white night of the Iranian attack, which disrupted the preparation and led to another white night on the flight, her star had to arrive separately from his friends; And after all that, she demonstrated basketball that was kissed to perfection and won 85:113. What more remains to be said, what more needs to be said.
Ketch's playing career was short, but he managed to spend it with some of the best basketball and psychology minds out there (David Blatt, Zvika Scharf, Pini Gershon and one, Zeljko Oberdovic). From them he learned, among other things, how to use public media to transmit encrypted messages within the group; The words he said about Brown in the last two weeks, on more than one occasion, are the perfect example.
The coach realized that without his center back in the good old form (even if not at one hundred percent), his team would soon encounter a glass ceiling. And what to do, the man will not function. He played on the walk, became a crossing pass in defense, missed shots that in the not-so-distant past he would have scored with his eyes closed. His deterioration was rapid and painful. But Ketch didn't give up; Even when he paid a price for it during games, even when the talkbackists and commentators tore him that he was "fixed". But he had a goal: to do everything for Brown to come back. at least partially. And at least for one evening, it worked. What worked, exploded.
In the 11th second he scored his first three-pointer; Not only the first in the play-in game against Baskonia, but the first after 11 consecutive fouls in four and a half games.
In the fifth minute he already had three three-pointers; It hasn't happened to him yet in 2024.
At halftime he was down with a season high of five three-pointers.
He finished the entire game with 7 of 8 beyond the arc. And this is already a record at a historical level. Only once (Tyler Dorsey with 8 of 9 in 2021) did a Maccabi Tel Aviv player score more; Neither he, nor Ronas Jasikvicius, Devin Smith and Scotty Wilbkin, who hit seven 3-pointers in one night, produced that performance in a knockout game. Brown yes.
So Brown came back. If it was a blip, then it's worth a ticket to the playoffs. And if it was just the swallow, then maybe she heralds the coming of Tel Aviv, you-know-where. In a season where there is no home, but Baldwin is playing at an MVP level, Josh Niebo is in his prime, Bonzie Colson is becoming the ultimate European small forward, and all the replacements know their role and perform it so well - a Brown comeback could take the team to another level.
And if so many players together meet the peak of their careers, who cares if the coach's face turns red, or if he even stands with folded hands? It's probably thanks to him.
In the end, basketball can often be interpreted as a matter for mystics. Baskonia had no chance against Maccabi Tel Aviv on the tenth anniversary of the yellows' first Milan miracle. And when it happens precisely on the evening when the legendary musician Jacky Elkayam, the voice behind the seventies hit "Maccabi Ours, Maccabi Tel Aviv", passes away, then it is no wonder that it ended the way it did.
And again, the holiday of Passover in Greece, Maccabi Tel Aviv against Panathinaikos, and Ketesh Makkah. Could it be that 24 years after the tear-jerking blockbuster, the best director in the universe is about to finally release the sequel?