"We were one win away from the cup," LeVay Randolph said with a grim face after Hapoel Jerusalem's Champions League final loss to Telecom Bonn. "Despite everything, I'm proud of my friends, the professional staff, the organization and the fans."
The talented forward expressed the message with which the team from the capital ended the week in Malaga - huge disappointment and great pride. Disappointment at missing out on the chance to win a European title, an opportunity who knows when it will return, and pride in the great road to the final.
Shorts celebrates, photo: FIBA
Working for the audience. Hapoel Jerusalem's marketing and community relations department underwent a huge upgrade this year along with the spokesmanship and media department. This week in Malaga showed just how much. Many fans came to the sleepy Spanish city without tickets.
Some were stuck before the semi-finals, some arrived just hours before the final empty-handed. The club opened a special war room that provided a solution for every fan and made sure that there was no one left outside the arena. "I arrived worried - and left relaxed with good tickets in hand," one fan told me.
Red fans in Malaga, photo: FIBA
The man who wasn't supposed to be here. When Aleksandar Dzikic received the sad news of his mother Milka's death last Tuesday, the team didn't know what he was going to do. He quickly made it clear to officials that he did not intend to skip the Final Four and postponed the funeral until today.
Yesterday morning, while the entire team was preparing for a flight to Israel, the Serbian coach and owner Eyal Chomsky boarded a plane to Serbia to pay their last respects to his mother. "He wasn't supposed to be here at all, we wanted to give him the trophy specifically," one player said sadly.
Aleksandar Dzikic. "Wasn't supposed to be here", photo: FIBA website
Sportsmanship Award. The word that for me symbolizes the current Final Four is sporting fairness. All the crowds provided wonderful encouragement and support to their teams, and knew how to respect the rivalry. The fans of Hapoel Jerusalem "stole" the show thanks to the large masses that came from Israel and the tremendous encouragement they provided to their players, but this did not arouse antagonism from the fans of the other three teams.
Telecom Bonn fans ended the final night with chants of "Hapoel, Hapoel" and received applause from everyone in the hall. The disappointed crowd of hosts Malaga, who finished fourth, also filled the stands en masse in the final and paid tribute to both teams. Maybe we'll learn something from this week, too.
Cornelius. Mol Bonn, photo: FIBA
A one-man show. "My role model in European basketball is Tyrese Rice," T told me. Jay Shorts during the Final Four. The finals, like all season, were a "tyrese-racey" performance by the best player of the season and the finals.
Aleksandar Dzikic, who has already "eliminated" quite a few senior players this year, also prepared a meticulous plan to stop the German team's star. He told his players that once Shorts gains momentum it is very difficult to stop him, so he asked to limit and make it difficult for him to move initially. But the MVP just stepped up and was unstoppable.
"Is he worth Euroleague?" one journalist asked the questions people like to ask in European basketball. "If I worked for a Euroleague team, I would take him immediately," replied Hapoel Jerusalem professional director Yonatan Alon.
Shorts. Stole the show, photo: FIBA
On the border of the Euroleague. "Tenerife is a Euroleague team in terms of the players, the professional staff, the organization, the process." When Aleksandar Dzikic said these things in his pre-semi-final press conference, it looked like he was just trying to put his opponent to sleep. But the Serbian coach meant what he said and was right in every word. The team from the Canary Islands is the closest thing in Europe to the Euroleague among the teams that do not play in it.
From conversations with basketball people here in Malaga, it turns out that her budget increases every season (her sponsor owns a huge hotel chain in Spain and other companies), almost any player she wants she can bring in. The esteemed coach Chos Vidoreta has built a well-oiled professional system with excellent assistants who are given more and more authority (one of them is on the sidelines more than him), and senior players stay in it for many years.
It's no coincidence that Marcelinho Huertas, who turns 40 next week, has made it clear that he has no intention of retiring. If we had to bet, out of all four teams in the Final Four, the team most likely to be there next season is Tenerife.
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Marcelinho Huertas. Never-ending, photo: FIBA
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