Complete disregard for Hapoel and Maccabi Tel Aviv: The surprising EuroLeague ranking

The new EuroLeague season will kick off in a month and a half, and the BasketNews podcast identified a list of big games and ranked them by interest level. Notable by its absence was the meeting between Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv — the only city derby not mentioned at all in the ranking. In fact, no meeting of the Israeli representatives was included in the list.

There are several city derbies in the EuroLeague. Olympiacos comes from Piraeus, adjacent to Athens, the Greek capital from which Panathinaikos hails. Alongside the Athenian and Tel Aviv derbies, there is also the Belgrade derby between Partizan and Red Star, and three derbies in Istanbul between Fenerbahce, Anadolu Efes, and Besiktas. The meetings between Besiktas and Anadolu Efes were also not mentioned in the ranking, but the meetings of both against Fenerbahce were.

BasketNews podcast ranks the attractive games

In the podcast, they identified the meetings between Pao and Olympiacos as the biggest game of the year, unsurprisingly. As "must-watch" they marked the Belgrade derby, the return game of Zeljko Obradovic with Pao to Belgrade against Partizan, and his meeting against his former team Fenerbahce.

And which big games can one perhaps skip? In the podcast, they surprisingly mentioned the Clasico between Real Madrid and Barcelona, as it seems both will field weaker rosters than last season. These categories also included the derby between Fener and Besiktas, the meeting between Real of Pedro Martinez against his former team Valencia, and the meeting of Valencia against former player Jean Montero who moved to Olympiacos.