After the triumph in the Italian Cup, Olimpia Milano returns to the EuroLeague season, traveling to Tel Aviv. This is the team’s first game Israel since the spring of 2023, before local teams were forced to play international games on neutral court for safety reasons. Hapoel Tel Aviv is a team with great ambitions and enormous potential; it’s no coincidence that they led the standings for months before hitting a rough stretch of games, marked by five losses leading into this clash. Milan approaches the game with high morale and virtually the same roster that won the Italian Cup in Turin. As is well known, the club and coach Peppe Poeta have decided to support the Italian national team’s trip to Great Britain by granting three players the opportunity to play for the Azzurri. As a result, the roster, while featuring the players routinelu most used, will lack the usual depth or wealth of alternatives. This is the 29th EuroLeague game of the season, so we are entering the final third of the season. The standings don’t allow for any lofty postseason dreams, and the schedule is hard, but the team intends to try to squeeze every last drop of its chance, starting with this game at the historic Tel Aviv arena, formerly known as Yad Eliyhau. In the early season loss to Hapoel, Olimpia struggled defensively against the opposing team, which almost always features four shooters simultaneously and can rotate four top-notch guards who are extremely dangerous as scorers. Obviously, to have a chance of winning in Israel, Olimpia’ll need to start from here and cover the defensive half of the court in order to lower the shooting percentages of Dimitris Itoudis’s team. Micic, Bryant, Jones, and Blakeney were all key players in the first game, with 59 points combined (Olimpia was without Josh Nebo at the time and Motley also played a crucial role). And then Olimpia’ll need to establish its offensive game, at a high tempo, riding the top spot in three-point shooting percentage (39.6 percent as a team) challenged by Hapoel’s defensive solidity, which typically allows the opponents to shoot only 33.3 percent from long range. In the Italian Cup, even taking into account the difference with the EuroLeague level, Olimpia scored 200 points in the first two games and then scored 33 in the first quarter of the final before slowing down organically. This is another factor to capitalize on ahead of this game, which promises to be a tough one overall, but even more so considering the current situation of an hungry opposing team.
NOTES – Hapoel Tel Aviv-Olimpia Milano will take place on February 26, 2026, in Menora Metavchim Arena in Tel Aviv at 20:05 Italian time
THE REFEREES – Carlos Peruga (Spain), Milan Nedovic (Serbia), Maxime Boubert (France).
COACH PEPPE POETA- “We need to recover all the physical and emotional energy we spent during an extremely tough and demanding competition like the Italian Cup, in order to compete against one of the most talented teams in the entire EuroLeague. In Tel Aviv, our first goal will be to slow down their several creators that they have, starting with a solid defense.”
HAPOEL TEL AVIV OUTLOOK – Hapoel has led the EuroLeague standings for a while despite being in its debut season, but it has lost six of its last ten games and comes into this game with five straight defeats that have pushed the team further back, although still in the playoff area. Coach Dimitris Itoudis has a fairly stable starting line-up with Vasa Micic and Elijah Bryant, two forwards in Collin Malcolm and Ish Wainwright, and Dan Oturu at center. But the team is also very deep, versatile, and has many different weapons to implement. Micic (11.6 points and 4.2 assists per game) is a former EuroLeague MVP and remains one of the competition’s biggest stars, just as Elijah Bryant—who played with Micic in Istanbul and the two won the EuroLeague title—is having the best season of his career and was a contender for the competition’s MVP award until at least a month ago. He’s currently averaging 15.1 points per game, 3.1 assists, and, most importantly, 6.0 rebounds per game. He’s shooting 57.6 percent from two and 38.8 percent from three. Between them, they’ve made 470 EuroLeague appearances. But Hapoel doesn’t lose consistency when they’re on the bench (although Bryant plays nearly thirty minutes per night) because their second point guard is Chris Jones, a veteran in his fifth EuroLeague season, averaging 9.8 points and 3.4 assists per game, shooting 41.3 percent from three. Yam Madar, a point guard for the Israeli national team (who is averaging 4.3 points per game), is another option. Antonio Blakeney is one of the most productive sixth men this season, the top scorer in China in 2023, and with Hapoel since last season. Now, he is averaging 12.8 points per game on 39.5 three-point shooting percentage. He’s a guard but can also play as a nominal small forward. Forward Ish Wainwright is the player who gives the team defensive balance: he’s averaging 4.7 points per game, adding 2.6 rebounds. The other forward is Collin Malcolm, who played for Paris Basketball last season, also a tough defender averaging 6.1 points and 3.7 rebounds per game. Also playing at power forward is Johnathan Motley, who can see minutes at center too, and is averaging 9.0 points per game, but with remarkable efficiency, 67.6 percent from two, and even some threes (51.4 percent on about one and a half attempts per game). The starter however is Dan Oturu, who has been one of the most solid players in the competition so far, averaging 12.9 points per game in 23.3 minutes, 71.3 percent from two, and grabbing 6.0 rebounds a game. 2.6 of those are offensive rebounds. The third center is Tai Odiase, another vertical player with 2.9 points and 2.1 rebounds in 11 minutes on the court.
GAME NOTES – Armoni Brooks is second in the EuroLeague in three-pointers made with 78 and has a 19-game streak with at least one three-pointer made. Marko Guduric is 15 points shy of the 3,000 career point mark.
