Maccabi Tel Aviv visits Paris on Thursday (21:30 Israel time) as they will look to take the positive momentum from their last game, a close 116-113 loss to Real Madrid and find a way to get by the slumping French team. The yellow-and-blue enter the contest in 17th place and a 5-16 record as they will try to top a Paris team that is coming off a win versus Anadolu EFES but had lost five straight games prior to that. The last time the two squads faced each other Tiago Splitter’s team had the upper hand in a 93-81 win that wasn’t even as close as the score would indicate.

Head Coach Oded Katash looked ahead to his club’s latest challenge, “There are some offensive things we did well against Real Madrid and we need to those and continue to do similar things moving forward. Defensively, this is a completely different game. Paris plays at a high pace and is a totally different team from the majority of clubs in the Euroleague. In the first round they surprised the league with the pace at which they play. We will try to use the previous game against them to learn and adapt ourselves. It’s hard to prepare too much tactically, we need to learn from what we did in the first game against them and do better, certainly in this road game.”

The Maccabi bench boss continued, “As coaches, we need to choose tactics and which formations will be suitable to slow them down. They depend and play around their star guard TJ Shorts, he is very dominant and we will need to play a team defense against him. They do a few offensive things, but at a very high level. We need to find a way to slow them down which we weren’t able to do against Real Madrid but we will have to do it versus Paris.”

Big man, Trevion Williams also shared his thoughts as to how Maccabi will need to play in order to come away with a win, “Maintaining our energy and carry over all the good things we did last game and stay together. Paris brings energy like any other team and they are very connected, we have to play the right way.”

Finally, Katash commented on the hostage deal that is hopefully about to come to fruition, “There is a lot of excitement. It’s unbelievable that they are still there but this is very good news. Let’s hope that it comes to fruition and that it goes smoothly.”