Maccabi Tel Aviv visits Partizan Belgrade on Friday (19:00) with over 20,000 fans who will be in the stands in Serbia to cheer on their team who recently appointed Joan Penarroya who began the season on the Barcelona bench. The yellow-and-blue come into the matchup having won four straight Euroleague games and improved their record to 7-10 with two more clashes to go to close out the first round and Katash would be thrilled to see his team enter round two with a 9-10 record.

“Overall we’re okay although we’re missing Zach Hankins who won’t be with us,” Katash said. “Relatively speaking, we’re coming in in decent shape. The issue is that we don’t really know what to expect—both because their roster is injured, which makes things very uncertain and because they have a new coach. We know the impact that can have, especially in an atmosphere like that, and it’s also hard to prepare professionally for things you don’t really know.”

Big man Marcio Santos shared his thoughts, “We know they got a good environment over there and there is always a lot of fans and a lot of energy, but we will come with a lot of energy too. We’re practicing a lot and everybody’s confident with the work we’re putting on. I think we gave to play our best game. The key I believe will be the mental focus as it’s going to be loud, it’s going to be difficult to talk and everything. So I think we need to know what we need to do well. We need to play good defense and we need to know where to attack, where to do the stuff we do well and we will be okay.”

Jimmy Clark agreed with his teammate, “We just want to pick up on all the momentum that we already have. We want to get another team win, play together, execute the game plan. So that’s the main focus for this game. We know how each other plays and we’re just trying to pick up and help each other at any point that we can, whether it’s on defense or offense, putting each other in the right positions. I feel like we’ve been doing a better job of that and bringing in more experience is helping us along the way.”

The experience that Clark is referring to is the recent arrival Iffe Lundberg from Partzian back in November. Since the Dane joined the club, things have been on the upswing with his poise and confidence on the court for Katash’s crew.

“He’s a big guard who plays on both sides of the ball. There’s no doubt he still needs time to get into rhythm and game shape, but his presence is very significant for us. It gives us a lot of calm and experience not only on the court, but also on the bench and in practice. It adds a lot. He had a few things about Partizan, talked about various players, about knowing them, just as an example, he knows them well.”

One thing is for sure is that a month ago, things looked very bleak for Oded Katash and Maccabi Tel Aviv when they were sporting a 3-7 record and looked to be sinking into the abyss and with everything going the wrong way, perhaps the bench boss didn’t even believe that such a swift turnaround was even possible.

“I don’t know, I didn’t plan it, certainly not. You know, you can plan a winning streak, but I definitely believed it would come in time and that it’s something that should happen naturally. We’ll know how to play better with each other and with many players without much European experience, I believed we’d look better.”