Step By Step – a closer look at Hapoel Bank Yahav Jerusalem

JERUSALEM (Israel) – Things can change very quickly during the course of a basketball season. One minute you are flying and the next you are knocked out and on the floor. In the case of Hapoel Bank Yahav Jerusalem, they have already seen two mirror cycles of this exact situation. Before the season started the recruitment of NBAers Thon Maker, Anthony Bennet, and BCL Coach of the Year Oren Amiel had many fans on cloud 9. But after three games of the season, the standings in Group B didn’t make great reading for those of a Hapoel Jerusalem persuasion.

They had lost all three, including two of those games at home in the Pais Arena, usually a fortress with those fans behind them. After a mid-season coaching change, things have completely flipped again. Sports Director and former player Yotam Halperin took over the coaching position and despite having never coached as much as a U14 youth team before, the team’s fortunes reversed almost instantly and Jerusalem have secured a place in the Play-In games – a position that looked impossible only weeks ago.

“I think Oren is a great coach, I think Oren is an amazing character as well”, said Yotam Halperin. Despite the rapid turnaround in the team’s performances and results, Jerusalem’s redeemer is attaching no blame to the man that he recruited.

“I was one of the guys that chose Oren to be the Head Coach of Hapoel Jerusalem and unfortunately, things went wrong. That can happen in Basketball, you can have the best coach in the world, in the best situation in the world, with the best players in the world and sometimes things can go wrong”, he stated. Whilst this may sound simplistic sometimes it is very difficult to explain why things don’t go to plan and in the world of performance sport, a club doesn’t always have the time they would like to find out why – difficult decisions need to be made.

“Never in my life”, Halperin said emphatically on the topic of previous coaching experience before stepping into the void left by Amiel. Indeed, it’s not often that we see a situation where a Sporting Director with zero coaching experience is offered the big job but at the same time, it would also be slightly disingenuous to describe Halperin as a complete newbie. A player that has worked with coaching greats such as Dusan Ivkovic, Svetislav Pesic, Zmago Sagadin, Pini Gershon, David Blatt, and Oded Kattash to name but a few, certainly isn’t starting with a blank page.

“I have been lucky enough to take things from all of them but the best coaches get the players to commit. Commit to the life of basketball, commit to the team, and most of all commit to themselves,” Halperin said when describing the lessons learned from playing under some of the best to ever scribble on the tactics board in Europe. There was also an element of luck, maybe even fate (if we are to be slightly dramatic) behind his ability to take the role when asked by the club. It was certainly not a planned career tangent for one of Europe’s up-and-coming front office stars. “In Israel, you can’t just jump in and coach, you need certificates and it only just happens that I had done my certificates a few months ago,” he said.

But things couldn’t have gone much better so far considering the lack of experience and unexpected circumstances. Jerusalem have lost only once under Halperin’s guidance, a road loss to Bnei Herzalia in the Israeli league. The win count is currently at nine. For Halperin, a lot of this new coach bounce is a direct result of exactly that, a reaction to a coaching change from the players. “When a club fires a coach, naturally everyone steps up. Players do extra that they weren’t doing before. I think the most important thing is to take it step-by-step,” he stated, before making it clear that step-by-step has become the mantra and credits his players for the same commitment that was so valuable to coaches that he learned from in the past.

“I think the players bought into it, we took it step by step, even possession by possession.”

Halperin, however, is under no illusions and isn’t willing to get ahead of himself despite the hot start.“As a coach, I don’t have any experience, I’m living day by day to learn and understand the situation. I can say that so far I have used more of my experience as a player. It’s very easy to understand players when you were in that situation before,” he said.

So, what has changed? The first place to look is the data…