It’s painful to see how little Olympiacos actually needs Tyrique Jones, the same player who, for a few hours, was crowned as the one who would save Maccabi Tel Aviv’s season. In this Olympiacos roster, I’m not sure he’ll get more than the 7 minutes he played last night, in which he scored 6 acrobatic points, grabbed 3 offensive rebounds and recorded 2 steals. I mean, it’s nice to have another athletic big, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that he’s not playing against you, but in a frontcourt that includes Sasha Vezenkov, Alec Peters, Nikola Milutinov and Donta Hall, each an artist in his own field, you can say with confidence that he’s needed more elsewhere. For example, at the No. 5 position of the team currently sitting 14th in the EuroLeague standings.

Maccabi Tel Aviv arrived in Piraeus after sweeping the season series over Žalgiris and without Lonnie Walker and John Dibartolomeo, but at least early on it looked like they were managing to keep up with the insane pace set by Sasha Vezenkov, who scored roughly five points per dribble and finished with 28 points. The yellow-and-blue opened the game under the direction of Jimmy Clark, who true to the cool-headed spirit of the times, knocked down shots from beyond the arc, managed to pull Milutinov out of the paint and nicely involved Roman Sorkin and Jaylen Hoard. Both teams, as mentioned, hardly missed and finished the quarter neck and neck.

Then came the bench units. While Bartzokas sent out Evan Fournier, Frank Ntilikina, Peters, Tyson Ward and company from the bench, Oded Katash’s substitutes arrived in full nightmare mode. Tamir Blatt distributed his lobs with an inexplicable nonchalance, as if Tyrique Jones were playing on our side. Marcio Santos further solidified his status as the undisputed king of pointless fouls in the EuroLeague (74), with a variety of needless shoves. Jeff Dowtin showed up when it was already too late and Oshae Brissett remains a professional, financial and psychological mystery. T.J. Leaf last night was like a leaf in the wind. The big man allowed Ward and Peters to blow by him time and again on their way to the rim.

The numbers from the second quarter tell the story: 31–10 for the Greeks, who took 18 shots, made 14 of them and grabbed three of the four available offensive rebounds. There wasn’t a single yellow jersey in the paint to stop the tide and that’s what happens when the best player in the EuroLeague (this year too) is catching his breath on the bench, with his only contribution being a crazy three-pointer from near the scorer’s table that set the halftime lead at 24. Not a fair fight.

In the third quarter, Maccabi managed to produce a run against the deep rotation in the Peace and Friendship Stadium. The yellow-and-blue got a few defensive stops with steals and better rebounding, scored in transition and cut the gap by no less than 16 points to within 8. Bartzokas responded with a timeout, in which he may have uttered the two words “offensive rebound,” which sent his team back to a safe margin.

In the fourth quarter, Maccabi again made comeback noises with the late return of Sorkin and Clark, who generated quick points that cut the deficit back to just 8 and planted false hope in the hearts of viewers at home. Not this time, because the competitive closing chord of the evening was played by Nikola Milutinov, who grabbed yet another of his four offensive rebounds and on the second chance put Sorkin on his back and drew an and-one that sealed the game’s fate. That’s where the dog is buried: Katash’s guys finished the game with just 13 defensive rebounds, six fewer than Olympiacos’s 18 on offense. Those turned into 25 points. You can’t win like that, the best you can hope for is a minimal loss. Not a fair fight.

For nearly all 40 minutes, the Greeks were in exemplary control on the offensive end and knew how to exploit every weakness in the yellow-and-blue roster, as they did in quite a few games this season in which Katash’s group made us feel, at least numerically, that it was in the “almost” zone. This is yet another Maccabi Tel Aviv game in which the score is a bit misleading. Supposedly, a 7-point loss, supposedly 93 points against Olympiacos, supposedly minutes of a comeback. But the truth is that in far too many games this season, the margin is 10 but feels like 30, which makes us wonder: how much juice does Maccabi Tel Aviv really have?