For three days at the end of April 2004, Yad Eliyahu Arena — wrapped for the occasion in Nokia's sponsor livery — stopped being just Maccabi Tel Aviv's home gym and became the center of European basketball. The city had won the right to host the Euroleague Final Four, and for the first time a club would get the chance to play for the continent's biggest club prize in front of its own crowd.
Maccabi Elite Tel Aviv, as the team was known under its title sponsorship that season, opened on 29 April with a tense semifinal against CSKA Moscow, the Russian giants who had eliminated Israeli teams in Europe before. Pini Gershon's side pulled away to win 93-82, while in the night's other semifinal Skipper Bologna needed overtime to edge past Montepaschi Siena, 103-102.
That set up a final on 1 May between the two semifinal winners — and it turned into one of the most lopsided nights in the competition's history. Maccabi never trailed. They led 31-13 after the first quarter, extended it to 55-30 by halftime, and were up 80-51 through three periods before running away to a 118-74 final margin: 44 points, the largest winning margin in a Euroleague championship game.
The shooting numbers were almost absurd for a final of this magnitude: 28-of-38 from the field (69 percent), 14-of-23 from three-point range (61 percent), and 20-of-24 at the free-throw line, against 35 rebounds and 31 assists as a team. American guard Anthony Parker, who had returned to Tel Aviv after a stint in the NBA, scored 21 points and was named Final Four MVP. He was backed by David Bluthenthal's 20 points, Šarūnas Jasikevičius's 18 and Israeli forward Tal Burstein's 17.
It was Maccabi's fourth European championship, following the club's breakthrough titles of 1977 and 1981 and its more recent 2001 crown — but the first won at home. Team captain Gur Shelef became the fourth different Maccabi captain to lift the trophy, and Gershon, already a cult figure in Israeli sport, added another chapter to his coaching legend.
The Israeli players on that roster — Burstein, Shelef, Yotam Halperin and Avi Ben-Chimol among them — shared the floor with an international cast that had made Yad Eliyahu Europe's toughest road venue: Parker, Jasikevičius, Bluthenthal, Maceo Baston and Croatian center Nikola Vujčić, who later described walking out to the home crowd's roar as making him feel like his legs were flying beneath him.
The blowout was so complete that with roughly five minutes left and the outcome long decided, several Maccabi starters came off the bench already wearing 'We Are the Champions' T-shirts underneath their warm-ups — a premature bit of celebration that, by one retelling, briefly complicated matters when Gershon needed to make a late substitution and found some of his players already out of uniform.
CSKA Moscow, the beaten semifinalists, salvaged bronze by beating Montepaschi Siena 97-94 in the third-place game, but the tournament's story had already been written on the main court. For a club and a country that measured its place in European basketball by how it fared on other people's floors, winning a final by 44 points at home was less a victory than a coronation.
The following season Maccabi would do it again, beating CSKA Moscow in Moscow to become the first club since 1991 to retain the Euroleague title — but it is the 2004 final, played in front of its own fans on its own hardwood, that is still remembered in Tel Aviv as the night the scoreboard simply gave up.
