Former Duke basketball captain Jon Scheyer. Photo: wiki commons.

Just days prior to game one of Maccabi Tel Aviv Electra’s quarterfinals playoff match up with the Greek Squad Panathinaikos, it was announced that American native Jon Scheyer, who has struggled mightily with the Israeli club this season, will not be making the trip to Athens. Team representatives announced on Sunday that Scheyer will be returning home for “personal reasons.”

Former captain of the Duke University Blue Devils NCAA Basketball Team, Scheyer joined the Maccabi Tel Aviv squad last June, signing a two year contract with the yellow and blue after going unselected in the 2010 NBA Draft.

From the very first moment he arrived in Israel, there was a great deal of excitement surrounding Scheyer. One media outlet went as far as to say that Jon Scheyer should be dubbed the “New Jewish Jordan”, in reference to Tamir Goodman, the original “Jewish Jordan”.

After missing the season’s first string of games due to “non citizenship” (A European League rule that prevents any team from having more than four foreign players on a team at any given time) Scheyer managed to average no more than 9.6 minutes per game, scoring an average of 1.3 points per appearance as he struggled to live up to fan and media expectations in a Tel Aviv market that has seen 40 Israeli League titles in 43 years.