The New York Knicks defeated Maccabi Tel Aviv 106-91 on Sunday, waiting out an odd delay in the third quarter when Maccabi coach Pini Gershon declined to leave the floor after he was ejected by officials.
The game between the NBA club and the Euroleague team from Israel was delayed for eight minutes in the third quarter, after Gershon received two technical fouls in quick succession.
The second came on a play that went against New York, whose Al Harrington was called for an offensive foul in front of the Maccabi bench and Gershon started shouting at referee Ben Taylor, who issued a second technical that carries an automatic ejection.
When Gershon showed no signs of leaving, Rabbi Yitchak Dovid Grossman, founder of the orphanage Migdal Ohr which was the charitable beneficiary of the game, came onto the court to ask officials to let the coach stay.
Gershon left, however, after a discussion with the officials, his assistant coaches and NBA security personnel.
Maccabi’s Yaniv Green said fans back home are used to Gershon’s antics.
“He likes the crowd, the crowd likes him very much,” Green said. “They’re coming to the game to see him even more than they’re coming to see us. He’s quite a character, like you saw today.”
Nate Robinson, who scored 19 points for the Knicks, had never seen anything like it.
“I’ve never experienced that before, but I mean there’s a first time for everything I guess,” Robinson said.
The game, like all of this year’s NBA pre-season games, was officiated by replacement referees, who were called in from the WNBA and NBA Development League after the NBA locked out regular refs in a contract dispute.
Maccabi are to play the Los Angeles Clippers today.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier