Pini Gershon

Pinhas "Pini" Gershon (פנחס "פיני" גרשון, born 13 November 1951), is an Israeli former professional basketball player and coach.

He won three top-level European-wide club championships as the head coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv.

In 1993, he led Hapoel Galil Elyon to the Israeli League championship, which was the first time in 36 years that it had not been won by Maccabi Tel Aviv.

In 1996, Gershon won the Israeli State Cup, while he was the head coach of Hapoel Jerusalem, after beating Maccabi in the final.

In different interviews, he expressed himself poignantly against Maccabi Tel Aviv, and against the club's dominance of Israeli basketball.

Therefore, it was quite a surprise when he became Maccabi Tel Aviv's head coach at the end of 1998.

At that time, Maccabi Tel Aviv was in a professional crisis, after several years of failing to enter the top stages of the EuroLeague, a status which it had enjoyed in the past.

Under his, and his assistant David Blatt's lead, Maccabi Tel Aviv surprisingly advanced to the 2000 EuroLeague Finals, where they lost to the Greek Basket League powerhouse Panathinaikos, in the final game.

After the 2000–01 season, Gershon took a break from coaching, mainly to do some self-searching and to travel around the world.

He won the FIBA SuproLeague championship in 2001, and the EuroLeague championship in 2004 and 2005.

A year later, Maccabi won the 2001 FIBA SuproLeague championship.

However, this achievement was overshadowed by the split between the two major European basketball unions at that time, into two separate leagues, which meant that most of the top European teams did not compete against Maccabi, but were instead in that season's EuroLeague competition.

Maccabi, under Gershon, went on to have an unforgettable Final Four, crushing Skipper Bologna 118–74 in the final, to become the EuroLeague champions for the fourth time (including the 2001 FIBA SuproLeague title).

This temporary retirement lasted for two seasons, and in the summer of 2003, Gershon returned to his former position as the head coach of Maccabi.

He had the goal of reaching the 2004 EuroLeague Final Four, which took place in Tel Aviv.

That goal was two seconds away from failure, when Maccabi, who was hosting Žalgiris in the game for the last spot in the EuroLeague Final Four, had to come from behind.

A marvelous three-point buzzer-beater by Derrick Sharp sent that game into overtime, in which Maccabi won and advanced to the Final Four.

He was named the EuroLeague Coach of the Year in 2005.

In 2005, Gershon led Maccabi Tel Aviv to another EuroLeague championship.

Having been the league favorites all season long, Maccabi Tel Aviv advanced to the 2005 EuroLeague Final Four, in Moscow.

The expected final was supposed to be between Maccabi and the hosts CSKA Moscow.

However, CSKA surprisingly lost its semifinal game to TAU Vitoria.

In the final, Maccabi easily beat TAU, by a score of 90–78.

Gershon was later named the EuroLeague Coach of the Year.

During the 2005–06 season, Gershon hinted that it would be his last season with Maccabi.

He led the team to the 2006 EuroLeague Final Four.

That time, however, Maccabi lost in the title game to CSKA Moscow, by a score of 73–69.

Gershon left Maccabi at the end of the season, and signed with the Greek club Olympiacos.

In his first season as head coach of Olympiacos, Gershon led the team to the Greek Basket League finals against Panathinaikos, and to the last 8 of the EuroLeague season, where the team was eliminated by TAU Cerámica.

Accusations of racism were raised, mainly by Olympiacos fans, concerning the lack of playing time for team star and crowd favorite, Sofoklis Schortsanitis.

In 2008, he was named one of the 50 Greatest EuroLeague Contributors, as a coach.

He was also the head coach of the senior Bulgarian national team.

Gershon grew up and studied in the city of Tel Aviv.

His mother was a Moroccan Jew and his father was a Bulgarian Jew.

He experienced a rough childhood, as his biological father abandoned the family when he was one year old and left him with his mother, in poverty conditions and moved to England; his step-father was abusive towards him, his sister and their mother.

In his youth, Gershon was a basketball player.

He played for the "Maccabi South Tel Aviv" club, which was a sister team of Maccabi Tel Aviv, and he was one of the stars in its cadets team.

He played for a number of years, including in the senior men's team of Maccabi South Tel Aviv, but his career as a basketball player ended at the age of 24, as the result of an injury.

After a short career as a basketball player, Gershon began to coach in different Israeli teams, among them, Maccabi Rishon LeZion, Hapoel Galil Elyon, Hapoel Gan Shmuel-Menashe, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapoel Jerusalem.

On November 24, 2008, he signed on as Maccabi Tel Aviv's head coach, after the dismissal of Effi Birnbaum from the position.