1) The Israel National Football Team flew to Albania for their Nations League contest on Friday night. Keeper Guy Haimov talked about the importance of the game, “There’s a good atmosphere and we are all clicking together. We can see that there is a serious plan in place and we can feel it as well. Hopefully this can translate to our play on the pitch. We have a chance to advance to the Euro 2020 and we are aware of that. We will do everything we can to make it to the competition. Albania is a tough team and they are an excellent club. But I am sure that the staff will have us prepared properly for the challenge.”

2) The Israel National Basketball Team headed to St. Petersburg for a pair of exhibition games against Russia on Thursday and Poland on Friday ahead of next week’s FIBA World Cup Qualifiers versus Georgia and Germany. Captain Gal Mekel looked ahead to the challenge, “These games are important as it will help shake off the rust from the summer where we didn’t play for a couple of months. We’ve only practiced for 4 days together so the games in Russia are super important for us to get into sync with one another.”

3) Willy Workman: “The more I thought about it, the more reasons I came up with to stay at Maccabi Haifa” – Sports Rabbi Show Episode 3

Willy Workman, one of Israel’s hardest working basketball players comes on board to talk about his career, Maccabi Haifa being relegated and more. Jeremy Brener of SB Nation’s The Dream Shake talks about Maccabi Tel Aviv’s new center Tarik Black and Lukas Feldhaus from Germany joins The Sports Rabbi to look at Hapoel Jerusalem’s Da’Sean Butler.

4) Former NBA All-Star Amare Stoudemire posted the following photo on Instagram. Is it an indication that Stat’s headed back to the Holy Land?

5) Basketball Exhibition Games
Hapoel Beer Sheva BC defeated Nahariya 74-73 in an exhibition game today. The host’s led 42-30 at the half but the northern side mounted a comeback with a 15:0 run after being down by 21 points but it wasn’t enough to steal the victory. Storm Warren scored 16p, Hanan Colman 13p, Jordan Swing 12p and Travis Warech 9p in the win. Myke Henry 17p and Iftach Ziv 12p led Nahariya.

Hapoel Holon beat Hapoel Gilboa/Galil 82-76. JayVaughn Pinkston scored 14p, Corey Walden added 11p and TJ Cline chipped in with 10p for Holon. Joaquin Szuchman dropped 17p, Ian Miller scored 16p while James Kelley added 11p and 9 rebounds in the defeat.