Hapoel Jerusalem

Jerusalem's basketball crowd fills the Pais Arena eleven thousand at a time, and for decades that following belonged to a club that started out in 1935 and only took formal shape as an institution in 1943. The team spent years bouncing between the top flight and the second division — dropped down in 1970, back up in 1972 — before coach Simi Riger settled the question of where Hapoel Jerusalem belonged, locking in permanent top-division status in 1986.

The breakthrough came in Charleroi in 2004, when Hapoel Jerusalem beat Real Madrid 83–72 to win the ULEB Cup, the first European title any Israeli club other than Maccabi Tel Aviv had ever lifted. Sharon Drucker coached that side, and Kelly McCarty was named Final MVP, but the run mattered beyond the trophy: it broke a monopoly Israeli basketball had taken for granted. A domestic league title took another eleven years to arrive, in 2014–2015, followed by a second in 2016–2017. The State Cup has come more often — eight times across three decades, most recently in 2024 — and the League Cup seven times, with a Super Cup added in 2025.

Amar'e Stoudemire's spell at the club left the deepest American footprint, and he later bought into it as a part-owner rather than just moving on after his playing days. Among the Israelis who wore the shirt, Doron Sheffer's name still carries weight from the era before the European title, when the club was building toward something rather than defending it.

None of it means as much locally as the games against Maccabi Tel Aviv, the fixture regarded as the biggest in Israeli basketball. Jerusalem once had home rivals too, Maccabi Jerusalem and Beitar Jerusalem among them, but both faded from the basketball scene, leaving the trip to Tel Aviv as the one date the city marks every season.