Real Madrid beat Maccabi 113-99 on 21 threes: the record and the gaps it hides

Third quarter, Real Madrid trailing, the ball goes inside and comes back out. Maccabi Tel Aviv's defense closes like a fist, and there is no way into the paint. The ball is swung beyond the arc, another three goes up. By the end of the night Real Madrid had 21 made threes, a club record in the EuroLeague, and 113-99 on the scoreboard. I rewatched the tape several times, not to count the makes, but to find who decided that was the only way to score. A three-point record does not come out of excitement. It comes out of a defense that has sealed the paint, and out of a team left with no other option but to shoot from distance.

Some context for anyone who was not watching. The EuroLeague plays 40 minutes across four quarters, and FIBA rules contain no defensive three-second violation. That sounds like a dry technical detail, but it is the key to the whole game. In the NBA, a help defender cannot camp in the paint for more than three seconds. In the EuroLeague, he can stand there for an entire half as long as nobody is holding the ball right beside him. Maccabi coach Oded Kattash used exactly that feature to build a closed, physical, athletic defense: anything inside gets swarmed, and anything outside has to be shot with a hand in your face.

Real Madrid came in with a familiar attacking corridor: Facundo Campazzo setting the tempo, Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot as the scoring spearhead, Andrés Feliz and Alberto Abalde as secondary attackers. Feliz only joined the club in the summer of 2026, which places this game in the most recent season window. The first half went badly: Maccabi played better, and Real Madrid lost both ends of the floor. The winning team's head coach admitted afterwards that his side “started the game not feeling good” and that the opponent played better than them.

Then the box score appears, and it offers a simple calculation few people bother to make. Twenty-one threes equals 63 points. Real Madrid scored 113 in total, so 50 points remain from twos and free throws. The telling part is the coach's admission that his team's two-point scoring was lower than its three-point scoring, which puts the two-point contribution somewhere in the 24-to-40 band. In other words, Real Madrid's two-point volume was compressed close to the minimum. This is not a team choosing threes because it likes them. This is a team pushed beyond the arc.

One more environmental detail: 212 combined points in 40 minutes is an extremely high figure by EuroLeague standards, where teams typically score around 80 apiece. This was a shootout, not a wrestling match. And every individual stat drawn from that night is contaminated by that environment. Based on my own experience watching EuroLeague games, nights like this always create the illusion that the winning team has just discovered a formula.

And this is where I want to linger longer than on the record itself: this game was decided by which team better exploited a rule environment that punishes help-and-rotate defense. Because without a defensive three-second rule, the most valuable defensive skill is no longer rotating on time, it is staying in front of your man. Real Madrid's second half followed exactly that logic. The coach described the shift in a very plain sentence: the team needed to be more consistent in one-on-one and two-on-two situations. That is not a complex tactical invention. That is simplification: fewer rotations, fewer mispositions, and winning individual matchups.

The second shift came from the bench. When Campazzo entered, Real Madrid recovered its rhythm. The coach said so directly, and he was equally direct about Luwawu-Cabarrot: when that player starts scoring, the team has someone who is “in rhythm”, and that matters a great deal. The phrasing is both praise and confession. A player described as being in rhythm is a high-variance player: ignition one night, a void the next.

What I took from rewatching the possessions: Real Madrid turned the game around through two sources of momentum that are fundamentally different in nature. The first is personnel, as Campazzo entered, the tempo changed, and the opposing defense was forced to react. The other is made shots. Momentum from personnel can repeat; momentum from made shots cannot. And a team that gets only 50 points from twos and free throws across 40 minutes is leaning on the second source more than is safe.

Which brings us to the point that every result is a deliberate lie. The number 21 is being used as an explanation when it is most likely a selection effect. A team that falls behind early and cannot score in the paint defaults to perimeter volume; the makes followed the necessity, not the other way around. The coach went further, saying his team tried to keep a “balance” between twos and threes. His own data says otherwise: three-point scoring exceeded two-point scoring. That is a familiar defensive rhetorical move after a variance-driven win.

And Maccabi, the losing side, had the better plan. Their packed defense did exactly what it was designed to do: close the paint and force contested shots from outside. They lost to an outlier shooting night, not to a tactical unmasking. The winning machine is only an illusion until someone is willing to break it, and on this night the thing that broke it was probability, not invention.

There is one small detail I value more than the record. The initial notes attributed the post-game quote to Pedro Martínez. Pedro Martínez coaches Valencia Basket, not Real Madrid; the winning coach that night was Chus Mateo. A wrong name in the notes does not make the 63-out-of-113 arithmetic wrong, but it reminds me that even data has an editor behind it.

When the EuroLeague reaches a best-of-five playoff series, opponents will have time to watch film and run Real Madrid off the arc. Playoff officiating also tends to loosen, meaning contact in the paint will be harder to get called. The question left behind is not whether Real Madrid can shoot threes, but whether, once the arc is closed, this team has a Plan B to generate points inside or get to the free-throw line. Basketball never ends with the buzzer, it ends with a question.