Last Sunday, in the Spanish city of Bilbao, two Spanish teams played each other in the Basketball Champions League final. Lenovo Tenerife defeated Baxi Manresa and lifted the trophy for the second time in the (just) six year history of the competition. The team from the Canary Islands also has a silver medal, losing the final in 2019 in Antwerp, against Virtus Bologna.

The only other team that has two BCL trophies in its trophy cabinet is another Spanish club, San Pablo Burgos, that won the competition back to back, in 2020 and 2021. Both years when Burgos won, Casademont Zaragoza also reached the Final Four, but was stopped in the semifinals. Interestingly, with just one round left to play in this year’s Spanish ACB, Burgos and Zaragoza are the two bottom teams in the league and are very close to relegation.

UCAM Murcia is another representative of the Spanish ACB League that played in the BCL Final Four, but lost by 2 points in the semifinals in 2018 against AEK in Athens.

Basically every edition of the Basketball Champions League Final Four had at least one Spanish team and the Spanish teams played in 5 of the 6 finals so far.

If we also take a look at the two competitions organized by EuroLeague, we can see that Barcelona and Real Madrid are both in the EuroLeague Final Four this year and have the biggest budgets in all of Europe. In the EuroCup, Valencia reached the semifinals (after winning the competition multiple times in the past years), Andorra was also eliminated in the semifinals while in the ACB they are fighting to avoid relegation and Joventut Badalona and Gran Canaria also made a great impression in this year’s EuroCup.

These results prove once again that the ACB League is without doubt the strongest domestic league in Europe. We can take any team from Spain and they will have a chance to win BCL or EuroCup.

*photo: championsleague.basketball

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