Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Maccabi Tel Aviv Routed by Cleveland Cavaliers in LeBron James Return

The NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers routed Maccabi Tel Aviv in an international exhibition game that pitted Cavs’ new coach David Blatt against his former team.

Maccabi Tel Aviv, the 2014 Euroleague and Israel Super Basketball League champions lost Sunday’s game 107-80.

The exhibition game had been scheduled long before Blatt signed on as Cavs’ coach in June.

The game also saw the return to a Cleveland uniform of LeBron James, who returned to his hometown Cavaliers as a free agent after spending four seasons with the Miami Heat. James, whose back has been bothering him, played the first half, scoring 12 points.

Blatt told reporters after the game that ”I was nervous before the game, but not because it was the first time I coached in the NBA. I was playing against my friends.”

More than a dozen of the credentialed reporters were from Israel, including the major newspapers and television stations, according to the Cleveland Jewish News. Blatt conducted a second news conference in Hebrew for the Israeli media following the game.

The game was also billed as Jewish Community Night.

About 50 pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena before the game, over comments Blatt made to an Israeli newspaper in the summer in support of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.