Volume 67, Issue 8

Hami Reaches Milestone with Streaky Macs

by Avi Mermelstein

On Thursday, January 30, in the Max Stern Athletic Center, Captain Eli Hami was honored before a game versus Brooklyn College for reaching the 1000-point milestone in his Yeshiva career.  Athletic Director Dr. Richard Zerneck presented Hami and Lady Macs’ all-time leading scorer Daniela Epstein with white-paneled ceremonial 1000-point balls.  Once the game began Hami showed no signs of stopping near 1000, scoring 32 points en route to an 83-77 overtime victory.  The performance reinforced Hami’s status as the one constant during this young Yeshiva team’s ride through an up and down season.

After starting the season a dreary 1-6, Yeshiva put together a respectable three-game winning streak.  The run of good play began with a 90-71 home victory over the College of Mount St. Vincent.  The Macs fell behind early, but soon began to attack the Dolphins’ pressure defense, consistently beating it for easy layups.  On the other end of the floor, the Dolphins were rushing and missing their shots.  By the half, Yeshiva had built a nine-point lead.

The second half was more of the same, with Hami putting on an incredible show that sometimes had even members of the Mount St. Vincent bench shaking their heads in wonder.  The captain regularly dribbled through two or three players to break the press and start fast breaks that he often finished himself, several times completing contortionist layups that drew fouls from the Dolphins and approbation from the crowd.  On the rare occasions that the Macs were forced into a half-court offense, Hami showed variety in his game, using his muscle to post up and quickness to elude his man along the baseline.  He finished with 30 points on 10-15 shooting, but he had help.  Shai Musberg added 22 and the team as a whole shot an incredible 71% from the field during the second half.  After following the win with victories against St. Joseph’s and City College, Yeshiva went into the winter break playing its best basketball of the season.

But the success did not carry over.  The team opened the new semester with a series of losses, the first a 79-50 rout at Kings Point College on January 21.  The Macs kept the game close through the first ten minutes of the first half, but Kings Point soon began to pull away, finishing the half on a 17-7 run to take an 11-point lead into the locker room.  Kings Point began the second half where they left off, quickly opening up a 20-point lead that put the game out of reach.  Hami finished with 14 points, but scored his last point 40 seconds into the second half.  The only other player in double-figures was Jonathan Joszef, who scored most of his 12 points with the game already out of reach.

Matters did not improve in the ensuing games.  Yeshiva dropped its next two out of three, sandwiching double-digits losses to conference rivals St. Joseph’s and Mount St. Mary’s around an unconvincing defeat of lowly Polytechnic.

Coach Jonathan Halpert mentioned several factors behind the losses.  He said that when his players returned after the break, “they weren’t in shape to play.”  He thought the lack of fitness resulted in injuries, especially key reserve Josh Gottlieb’s injured hamstring.  Point guard Shai Musberg also fell prey to the injury-bug, returning from vacation with a sickness to add to the thigh injury that has bothered him all year.  Halpert noted that the team was not deep enough to afford the loss of any players.

Besides the fitness problem, Coach Halpert found that over the course of the losing streak the offense was weighed down with “not enough patience and not enough ball movement.”  The stagnant offense consisted of players trying to break down a defense down one-on-one, which did not play to the players’ strengths.  Besides agreeing with the coach’s assessment of the team’s fitness, Captain Hami also saw the team’s overall inexperience as a factor in coming back from the layoff, as players seemed unfamiliar with the plays.  These are what the coach called some of the “old bad habits” that marked the early season problems.

In the midst of the team’s struggles, Hami produced an historic moment that threatened to live in anonymity.  In the win at Polytechnic, Hami spotted up from the top of the key and nailed a three-pointer.  The shot propelled Hami into the elite company of twenty-one other players in Yeshiva’s history who scored 1,000 career points.  At the time, the historic moment was merely acknowledged by a brief announcement during the next stoppage in play appreciated only by a small contingent of away fans among the equally small group of home fans.  But the ceremony in front of the home crowd gave the achievement considerably more attention.

As of now, Hami does not think much about his achievement, saying that it will “mean more later on, after the season.”  However, few others share the captain’s reluctance to discuss the milestone.  Dr. Zerneck called “a thousand points in the last three years” an impressive achievement.  He noted that Hami had, until this year, played in the shadow of Yeshiva’s all-time leading scorer Yossy Gev, a situation which he thinks resulted in the Skyline Conference’s “unwarranted” tendency to overlook Hami.  The good doctor finds the achievement even more remarkable because, as the teammate of a scorer as prodigious as Gev, Hami took less shots than he might have.  “No doubt that Eli sacrificed for the good of the team,” he says.  Coach Halpert, who coached fourteen out of the twenty-two 1000-point scorers in Yeshiva history, calls Hami “one of the best backcourt players ever to play here.”

As the focal point of Yeshiva’s offense Hami has been getting a lot of attention from opposing teams.  Many have resorted to running a double-team at Hami the instant he puts the ball on the floor.  Despite this, Hami leads the league in scoring, averaging more than 24 points a game.  He also leads the league in steals, averaging nearly 4 per game.  His play has earned him two Skyline Conference Player of the Week awards.

Besides the outstanding play of Hami, one of the bright spots on the team has been the play of Rafi Halpert, who, at perhaps 6’1”, manages to place among the league leaders in rebounds, pulling down more than 7 a game.  Coach Halpert attributes Rafi’s success to good boxing out and strong post defense.  Above all, says the coach, “Rafi works hard.”

As the stretch drive of the season approaches, the team looks to get back on track.  Hami believes that to play its best the team needs to “maintain structure on offense and maintain intensity on defense.”  Coach Halpert hopes that with the team back in shape and injury-free they can do well in the coming games.♦

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