Maccabi Tel Aviv fell to Anadolu EFES 85-78 to open up their Euroleague campaign on the wrong foot. Oded Katash’s squad took a small lead into halftime but were unable to hold onto the 4-point advantage as they came up short in a game that was played in Podgorica due to the poor relations between Israel and Turkey.

Jaylen Hoard scored a pair of triples while Roman Sorkin and Jeff Dowtin Jr. also found points for Maccabi Tel Aviv while Shane Larkin, Ercan Osmani and Kai Jones countered for Anadolu EFES but the yellow-and-blue grabbed a 44-40 advantage at halftime. Larkin kept finding the bottom of the basket as did Jordan Loyd with a couple of 3-pointers, Rolands Smits and Nick Weiler-Babb also scored to bump the lead as points from Tamir Blatt and Sorkin weren’t enough as Maccabi succumbed to EFES.

Next up for Katash’s crew is a home away from home clash against Paris Basket on Friday night in Belgrade, Serbia as the yellow-and-blue will look for their first win of the season.

Hoard and Sorkin each scored 15 points in the loss while, Smits scored 16 points, Larkin added 14 points and Loyd put in 13 points in the win.

“Too bad,” Katash began.”I feel like for some minutes we controlled the game in the first half and played how we wanted to. It wasn’t our best shooting day but I don’t think that is the main reason we lost the game. We lost our structure and system that we had in the first half. It’s part of the process as how to know how to play as a team. With time I am sure we will get better. We missed some experience.”

“Good win for our team and it wasn’t pretty at all,” EFES Head Coach Igor Kokoskov said. “We had guys who came back from their national teams and we had a disadvantage going into this game but it was all desire by the guys. We are looking for a lineup who can get us offense which we found in the second half.”

Oshae Brissett alao spoke about the clash, “They got too many offensive rebounds at the start of the game and if we controlled that in the first half we would have been alright. We need to be consistent in what we do. I think we have good runs and flashes as we had in the preseason but we need to out this together for a full 40 minutes.