2024-25 Buducnost Podgorica
062 · 2025-06-06 · easy
Fixture congestion, they call it. A lovely lyric to read and speak, but pure shin-splint hell for the pro athletes who are stuck inside. It's mostly a footsoccer term, referring to clubs that now play upwards of 80 matches per year: the domestic league, "Europe", the national cup, the super cup in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, and finally a super-super cup staged specifically for the benefit of middle-class Americans who all of a sudden don't have disposable income anymore. It's been a load-manageable problem in the 82-game Association, but European hoops are now coming face-to-face with the Content Monster. It used to be that everything wrapped up by mid-May, but some leagues – Israel, Italy and Turkey in particular – might still be on after the 2025 NBA Finals are over. Most of this can be traced back to a high-level truce in summer 2023, when the EuroLeague agreed to stop scheduling games in FIBA's international windows. The inevitable result was that everything else slid forward into June; now that the EL is 20 teams and 38 games again, the "offseason" may soon come to resemble the six weeks between the ATP Finals and Australian Open. So what to do? Is there a way to "hack the system"? Why, yes! All you have to do is be a sensibly-run club with stable finances that wins a lot... but not too much. KK Buducnost – literally "basketball club of the future" – is the pride of Montenegro, a country known primarily from "Serbia and" in the early 2000s, and Olympic bronze medals in water polo. (I live within a day's drive, and Montenegro crosses my mind maybe once every six months.) Buducnost VOLI is regarded by real true heads as an origin point of dearly-departed Jokic mentor and Golden State poach-target Dejan Milojevic, and locally as the third-best team in the ex-Yugoslavia ABA League behind Crvena Zvezda (Red Star) and Partizan. In 2024-25, with their Belgrade-based rivals dragging ass from EuroLeague fixture congestion and Eurobasket qualifiers, Buduc soared to first place with a 26-4 record and the league's top defense. A victory in the best-of-five finals against Partizan would mark only their second Balkan title, first since 2018. Oh, wait, there's a third thing this club is famous for: throwing random shit. Buducnost's ultra brigade is called Varvari, or The Barbarians, and this is a partial list of the items they have tossed from the Stadion Pod Goricom north stands to disrupt footsoccer matches: rocks, bricks, fluorescent light fixtures, tear gas, smoke bombs, petrol bombs, and "construction materials". During the third quarter of ABA League semifinal Game 1, Varvari threw nuts, bolts, screws and "glasses" at the Red Star bench. This led to empty stands and a 40,000 euro fine. As far as I'm concerned, the most important part was left out of every single news report and disciplinary notice: at the time of the incident, Buducnost was leading by 23 points.
