Maccabi Tel Aviv heads to Germany for a date with Bayern Munich on Friday night at 22:00 as the yellow-and-blue will look to close out the first round of Euroleague play with a 9-10 record by winning their 6th straight game. Everything is tuning up roses, yellow ones, for Maccabi right now as it seems that they can do no wrong with Head Coach Oded Katash running what is a well oiled machine and one of the hottest teams in the continent.

However, as poorly as Bayern has played this year who sport a 5-13 record and good for 20th and last place, they do have anew man in charge in none other than legendary Serbian coach Svetislav Pesic who has now been in the job for roughly two weeks.

Hapoel Tel Aviv visited Munich and took care of Bayern last week and Maccabi will look to do the same as they will try to stay in the hunt for the postseason. However, Pesic, who may have been in charge last week, his first on the job, will no doubt have a few new tricks up his sleeve as the wily veteran bench boss knows full well how to start making changes as to how a team had played, in this case Bayern, up until now.

“When you look at their roster, they’re better than their results,” Katash began. “Pesic is now the coach and once again we find ourselves playing against a team that has changed coaches. In the game against Hapoel, they couldn’t really fix or change much, but in the recent league games we’ve seen them doing things completely differently.”

Forward Will Rayman spoke about what he sees in the upcoming Bayern clash, “They have a really good roster and a really good team just overall. It’s a really fun place to play, so we’re excited, we’re looking forward to it and try to extend this winning streak to six games.”

We know Bayern are not in the best shape,” Marcio Santos added. “They are not in the top 10 I can say, but we know they are a good team and they have some great players. They’ve got great shooters, so we need to be focused in the game, go there and play some defense on the court, match the physicality and play hard.”

The “new coach effect” will be in full effect in this game and it’s something that Katash is wary of and how that might urn the tables in a game that Maccabi really should win, “Obviously there’s the effect of the coaching change, they’re more committed and they’ve gotten a kind of new energy. Defensively, they’re more present. To the point that they run a lot of set plays, especially post-ups that are very different from what most EuroLeague teams do and we need to come prepared for that.”

“It’s always important to beat the teams that are under you,” Raymam chimed in. “I know next week we have a really big double week also [Barcelona and Real Madrid], so it’ll be really important to try to get back to .500. We have to keep it going and keep the momentum up.”

Katash added, “We also don’t know who will play and who won’t play on their team, with Spencer Dinwiddie and a few others there. Also versus Bayern, like it was against Partizan, you have a situation where you don’t really know which players will actually be available as they have a very deep roster.”

“I think they will come with a lot of energy,” Santos added. “There was a lot of hunger to play and we need to show up hungry to play, hungry to win and start the year with a good game. We just have to go out there, match the physicality and play hard. If we do that then I think we will be okay.”