


Hapoel Vegan Friendly Tel Aviv entered the game against Slask Wroclaw without backup point guard Bar Timor, who averages 23 minutes and 3.0 assists per game. Then, late in the second quarter, J'Covan Brown was taken to hospital after a blow to the head that saw him lose consciousness on the floor.
And while the first thing on everyone's mind was Brown's well-being, he had 9 of Hapoel's 14 assists up to that point. The hosts did hold a comfortable 19-point margin, but there was uncertainty about how the team would react. Few could have imagined that by the end of the night Hapoel would end up with 33 assists, one shy of a EuroCup record.
"Once J'Cowan went down, we definitely wanted to win for him," said Jordan McRae who mostly took over the point guard position and finished with 7 dishes. "I played some point guard in my day, Xavier Munford played little point before, so we tried to play point guard as a team and tried to get things going."
In the end, each of the 11 Hapoel players in uniform dished at least 1 assist and seven players had multiple assists.
The mark of 33 assists shattered the club's previous season-high of 27 and came within a whisker of the EuroCup record of 34 set by Aykon Ted Ankara Kolejliler and Khimki Moscow Region in the 2013-14 campaign.
The team effort on ball movement led to Hapoel scoring 103 points, and winning by 30, a stylish way to snap a three-game losing streak, all while keeping J'Covan Brown in their thoughts.