Maccabi Tel Aviv

Tal Brody arrived in Tel Aviv in 1966 and stayed long enough to captain the team that beat CSKA Moscow in the 1977 semi-final, a result he greeted with the words "We are on the map!" The final against Mobilgirgi Varese, won under coach Ralph Klein, brought Maccabi its first European Champions Cup and set a standard the club has measured itself against ever since.

Domestically that standard has rarely slipped. Maccabi has taken the Israeli Basketball Premier League title 58 times, often several years running, and the Israeli State Cup 47 times, leaving Hapoel Tel Aviv, its rival in the Tel Aviv derby, to play catch-up for most of the past half-century. Maccabi Haifa is named alongside Hapoel as a rival, though the Tel Aviv fixture carries the greater weight.

In Europe, the 1977 breakthrough was followed by another title in 1981, then a gap of two decades before Pini Gershon took the club back to the top in 2001 and delivered back-to-back EuroLeague titles in 2004 and 2005. David Blatt added a sixth continental crown in 2014, beating Real Madrid. Between those wins came nine runner-up finishes, a reminder that reaching a Final Four here has rarely been the hard part.

The club plays out of the Menora Mivtachim Arena, known locally as Yad Eliyahu, which holds just over 10,000 — modest by the standards of a team with six European titles, but full often enough that the number has stopped mattering. Maccabi Tel Aviv was founded in 1932, three and a half decades before Brody ever set foot in Israel.