On the afternoon of 13 May 2001, inside the sloped glass-and-steel pyramid of the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, Maccabi Tel Aviv beat Panathinaikos 81–67 to become champions of Europe for the third time. It should have been a simple, glorious sentence. It wasn't quite that simple, because for one strange season, European basketball had two champions of Europe at once — and Maccabi's rivals in Barcelona and Bologna would have argued the "real" one was crowned somewhere else entirely.
The story begins in July 2000, when a breakaway group of clubs, backed by television money and organisational ambition, founded a new body called Euroleague Basketball and launched their own competition outside FIBA's control. FIBA had never trademarked the name "EuroLeague" and had no way to stop the new venture using it. So FIBA rebranded its own long-running top competition — the one Maccabi had already won in 1977 and 1981 — as the FIBA SuproLeague. Clubs had to choose a side. Real Madrid and Barcelona went with the new Euroleague. Maccabi Tel Aviv, along with Panathinaikos, CSKA Moscow and Efes Pilsen, stayed loyal to FIBA.
It meant that for the 2000–01 season, and that season only, European basketball crowned two separate, rival champions from two separate top-tier competitions. Kinder Bologna won the breakaway Euroleague. Maccabi Tel Aviv won FIBA's SuproLeague. Neither side played the other. Both, technically, could call themselves champions of Europe.
Maccabi arrived in Paris under Pini Gershon, the coach who had taken over the club in 1998 and rebuilt it around a mix of hardened Israeli internationals and imported American talent. Nadav Henefeld, once an NCAA Freshman of the Year at Connecticut, captained a team built around point guard Ariel McDonald, wing Anthony Parker, forward Tal Burstein and the physical, relentless American centre Nate Huffman, with Derrick Sharp, Gur Shelef, Radisav Ćurčić and David Sternlight filling out the rotation.
In the semifinal on 11 May, Maccabi survived a tense contest with CSKA Moscow, winning 86–80 to set up a final against a Panathinaikos side that, a year earlier in Tel Aviv, had lifted the very same trophy. This time there would be no repeat. Maccabi controlled the final from early on, pulling away in the second half to win 81–67 in front of a crowd inside the Bercy that had, fittingly, watched the club's coronation before — Maccabi had beaten Real Madrid in that same arena to win its first European title back in 1977, under Ralph Klein.
Huffman was immense in the final, finishing with 21 points and nine rebounds, numbers in keeping with a playoff run in which he averaged 17.5 points and nine boards a game; his performances across the season won him both the Israeli league MVP award and, from the SuproLeague itself, Player of the Year. It was Ariel McDonald, though, who was named Final Four MVP, his composure at the point guiding Maccabi through both the semifinal grind and the final's decisive stretches.
For Gershon and his players, the trophy meant more than another line in the club's record book. Maccabi had been champions of Europe in 1977 and again in 1981, under Klein, in a golden era built around Tal Brody and Miki Berkovich. After 1981, two decades passed without another continental title, through coaching changes, near-misses and heartbreaks. Paris in 2001 ended that wait — Maccabi's third European crown, and its first in twenty years.
It also turned out to be a historical curiosity in its own right. The FIBA/ULEB split lasted only that one season; from 2001–02 onward, the two rival competitions merged back into a single, unified Euroleague, the format that has run ever since. That made Maccabi's 81–67 win over Panathinaikos the last continental club title FIBA Europe would ever organise on its own — a trophy from a competition that, by the following autumn, no longer existed under that name.
Gershon's Maccabi did not stop there: the same coach would lead the club to two more European titles in 2004 and 2005, cementing a run that turned the Yad Eliyahu-based club into one of the sport's dynasties. But Paris 2001 was the hinge — proof, after twenty lean years, that the club built by Klein and Brody could still be built again.
Nate Huffman stayed on with Maccabi through 2002, later playing in Italy and Israel again before retiring, and remained a beloved figure in Tel Aviv, running youth basketball camps with former Maccabi player Constantin Popa. He died in October 2015, aged 40, of bladder cancer, at his family home in Battle Creek, Michigan — a reminder, a decade and a half after Bercy, of how briefly and brightly that Maccabi team burned.
