Hapoel Tel Aviv

Yad Eliyahu, the Tel Aviv neighbourhood, has had a basketball club named after its own arena for longer than the current building has stood, and for much of the twentieth century Hapoel Tel Aviv was the workers' answer to the city's other team: founded in 1935 within the Histadrut labour federation's sports network, playing in red against Maccabi's yellow. The league titles came in a run through the 1960s, five of them between 1960 and 1969, with four State Cups spread out to 1993 marking the decades in between.

The derby against Maccabi Tel Aviv is the fixture the club is built around in the public mind, a rivalry with a history of crowd trouble and finals still argued over decades later. Matches against Hapoel Jerusalem and Hapoel Holon carry their own weight.

Nate Robinson's 46 points against Hapoel Jerusalem stands as a playoff-record outlier from a short 2016 spell; more instructive of the club's arc is what happened in the spring of 2025, when a squad built around Vasilije Micić and coached by Dimitrios Itoudis beat Gran Canaria 103–94 to win the EuroCup. The result put Hapoel Tel Aviv into the EuroLeague for 2025–26, the first time an Israeli team had reached that level since Maccabi's long monopoly on it, and briefly gave Tel Aviv two clubs in Europe's top competition at once.

The team now plays at the Menora Mivtachim Arena, built to replace the demolished Ussishkin Arena. Seating: 10,383.