Hapoel Tel Aviv came up short against Real Madrid 75-74 as Mario Hezonja came up with huge points down the stretch in a tight battle in Bulgaria. In a back and forth affair that saw the two squads head into halftime neck-and-neck with the Reds down 39-36, it looked as if Dimitrios Itoudis’s team would pull away at the end of the third quarter after opening a 58-52 lead thanks to Johnathan Motley, Elijah Bryant and Antonio Blakeney. However, points from Andres Feliz, Gabriel Deck and Theo Maledon quickly gave Sergio Scariolo’s team the lead while Hezonja had key points in the final frame to close out the win.

Chris Jones and Blakeney each scored 14 points in the loss as Hezonja led all scorers with 19 points in the win.

“Congratulations to Real,” Itoudis began. “It was a real struggle. We started the game a little slowly, but they put up a fight. The absurdity is that we won three quarters by one point, but it wasn’t enough because we lost the first quarter by four. It could have gone the other way and it was deserved, because we put up a fight. It was a challenge, every game is a challenge.”

“I think that we won the game there,” Scariolo stressed. “When they went 6 up, we didn’t panic and kept clear ideas of what we had to do, and we responded with a great run. From then on, it was still a good game, open and close at the same time, but we had gotten the confidence that we could respond to their runs. I think it’s a big win for the level of the opponent, the control we had during the 40 minutes and the fact that we arrived here at 3:00 in the morning after some complications yesterday.”

Chris Jones spoke about the game, “We started off slow but we ended up winning the other 3 quarters, we locked in later. We fought hard and this is a good team. A lesson learned for sure and we will get better. We are building and it takes time and we will be better as time goes on.”

“I think that the coaches and the staff prepared the game extraordinarily well,” Hezonja, the game MVP told EuroLeague TV. “I think that all of us, as a team, stepped forward. We managed to not make their [Hapoel’s] impact so big. Everybody was very serious and we deserved to win today. We beat a team that is very hot right now in the EuroLeague, but we need to treat everybody like this: go out and kill. We need to take a step forward both offensively and defensively if we want to be where we want to be at the end of the season, which is with the trophy.”