Hapoel Tel Aviv trounced Nes Ziona 90-54 as the reds jumped put to an 18-1 lead while Antonio Blakeney was unstoppable over the course of the first half of play to go up by 30 points and never look back to take the easy victory.

Blakeney led all scorers with 22 points, Jonathan Motley added 16 points and Noam Yaacov scored 13 points in the win. Bryce Brown scored 14 points and Ricky Lindo put in 12 points in the loss.

“We played serious and with respect for our opponent and we respected ourselves,” Hapoel Tel Aviv Head Coach Dimitrios Itoudis began. “We were dominant from the beginning and we wanted to make stops on the defensive end. Offensively we had 31 assists and they only had 4. We forced them to have a lot of isolation in their game and overall we were the better team.”

“Unfortunately we weren’t in this game for the entire 40 minutes,” Nes Ziona head coach Amit Sherf said. “We had 4 assists and we weren’t there for one another and that was that. We played very poorly and very quickly they hit a few 3-pointers. From there the guys tried to play for themselves and things went the wrong way from there. When it was 12-13 point lead we just couldn’t get back into the game.”

Antonio Blakeney looked back at the win, “I’m always trying to be aggressive and I want to make every shot that I shoot. My teammates were finding me in the right spots and I was able to make them. We had some good long practices and we went hard and we checked ourselves. We wanted to get better on some things.”

Bryce Brown spoke about his teams performance, “I don’t feel like the intensity was there, the physicality wasn’t there and we didn’t make any shots. I didn’t come to play and I had a stomach virus and was a bit hurt. As a team we have to be better and play with a sense of urgency and with sense of intensity. We need more ball pressure and physicality.”

Yam Madar scored on the outside and inside, Jonathan Motley addd points in the paint and Antonio Blakeney also scored to give Hapoel Tel Aviv an 18-1 lead to get the game underway, Ricky Lindo put in a pair for Nes Ziona but points from Noam Yaacov gave the reds a 25-9 lead after ten minutes of play.

Blakeney was red hot and couldn’t miss from a where on the court as Bryce Brown tried to keep the hosts in the same time zone but more baskets by Yaacov gave Dimitrios Itoudis’s team a 55-25 advantage at halftime.

Lindo and Brown scored to get the third quarter underway, Bruno Caboclo, Marcus Foster and Oz Blayzer answered right back to stay in front 73-44 after thirty minutes of action as Motley and Caboclo kept scoring to wrap up the 36-point win.

Hapoel Galil Elyon held off Elitzur Netanya 69-65 who made a frantic game comeback to notch the 4-point victory. Rawle Alkins and Lennard Freeman along with Marcus Carr helped Guni Izraeli’s team to a 61-44 lead after three quarters of play, but Kyler Edwards spurred a comeback along with Bryce Washington and Roee Paretzky to cut the lead down to 67-65 with a minute to go. However, Washington missed a pair of free throws with 8 seconds left and Alkins hit his to ice ice the game and take the win. Alkins and Freeman scored 17 points a piece for Galil while Paretzky scored 14 points and Edwards added 13 points in the loss.