The advantage of having advanced the work will allow La Laguna Tenerife to take the last stop of the group stage of the Basketball Champions League almost as a training session. The Tenerife team secured its classification for the Top 16 of this competition – it will begin on January 20 and 21 – with one game remaining, despite losing on the penultimate date with Trapani. Now he reaches the sixth and final match with his first goal achieved in the continental tournament. Opposite, a Herzliya that also has no qualifying obligations, given that it is and will continue to be the bottom of Group D of the BCL no matter what happens in this confrontation, behind its rival this Tuesday, Trapani and Tofas Bursa, two teams that will play for their place in the Top 16 in a previous qualifying round.
From Lugo to Opava
The plan, in any case, is to close this European stage with a single defeat. After winning the Liga Endesa duel with Breogán last Saturday (96-108), Canarias will continue a few more days away from home. From Lugo he traveled by bus to Santiago to take a flight to Madrid and another to Vienna, where he connected by road with the Czech city of Opava, the provisional headquarters of a Herzliya team that is not being able to compete at home in its country, Israel, and that has only one victory in its Champions League statistics, the one achieved against Tofas Bursa on December 9.
Rest for Huertas, Fitipaldo and Guerra
The particular situation of the Israeli club was already in the news in the first round match with LaLaguna Tenerife. That match was played on October 14 at the Santiago Martín behind closed doors. This inconvenience did not prevent the Aurinegros from showing their usual level and winning with solvency, 108-85. Four players who will not be in Opava had minutes in that game. Apart from Kostas Kostadinov, who was released from the club last Sunday by his own decision to have minutes in another destination, Andorra, there will be three missing who will take the opportunity to restr. These are the cases of Marcelinho Huertas, Bruno Fitipaldo and Fran Guerra. The three traveled from Lugo to Tenerife, they did not accompany the rest to the Czech Republic and will join the group with a view to ACB's match with Girona this Saturday (5:00 p.m.).
Three from the subsidiary
To fill these vacancies, Txus Vidorreta hired the Fundación, a subsidiary that is taking off in the newly created Liga U. The youth players chosen were guards Dylan Bordón and Rafa Rodríguez, and center Mohamed Sangaré.
Convenient resource management, given the circumstances, to be able to dose efforts in such a tight stretch of the calendar –before the end of the year, three Liga Endesa matches, the one mentioned in Girona and two more, against Gran Canaria and Coviran Granada in Tenerife– and try to overcome a Bnei Herzliya team that occupies sixth place in the Israeli top flight with five consecutive victories after starting the season with three setbacks. In their squad, seven players with American passports, two of them with past in ACB, point guard Max Heideger (Baskonia) and center Chinanu Onuaku (Joventut).
