2025-26 BC Rytas Vilnius
113 · 2026-05-11 · medium
Back when I was spending winters in Belgrade (or rather, back when it was safe for foreigners to do so), I went to a lot of basketball games. There was at least one EuroLeague matchup every weekend, a couple of Adriatic League midweek tilts, and U18 all the time. You could find youth league games every single night, somewhere in the city, and you could usually find me there in the bleachers. It was me, my Serbian journalist friends, a few degenerates scrolling the Mozzart Bet app, and somewhere around a hundred NBA and NCAA scouts. Hoop heaven, it was. So when FIBA announced that the 2024 Basketball Champions League final four would be held at 18,000-seat Stark Arena, less than a thousand locals showed up. We had plenty of great basketball, hvala vam, we didn't need to pay 100 euros to see Spanish Liga ACB teams play. (There are eight channels of SportsKlub if you're into that kind of thing; it's like ESPN+ but all basketball and tennis.) Obviously, I went anyway. It reminded me a lot of attending the old NIT, before the NCAA took it over in the mid-2000s, how there would be lots of pomp and circumstance and confetti even though everyone at Madison Square Garden knew what exactly was up. The BCL is the same way: the EuroLeague and EuroCup playoffs are going on at the same time, and those actually count for something. The locals only showed up for the 2024 lowercase final four because Darko Rajakovic made an appearance. The first Serbian head coach in NBA history – nobody's counting Igor Kokoskov – was a year into Toronto's mega-project of turning into a Euroteam, and Rajakovic was on his way to becoming as much of an North America-conquering national hero as Nikola Jokic. He even brought The Raptor with him! Everybody loves The Raptor. Two years later, despite a strongly-worded cease-and-desist from The Mid-Majority, the BCL concluded its "Season X" this past weekend in Badalona, a place where folks gladly pay to watch Spanish basketball. Unfortunately for Liga ACB, both Unicaja and Tenerife were eliminated in the semis and the final was Lithuania versus Greece. Fortunately for FIBA, all 10,000 seats at Palau Municipal d'Esports were filled, and the Basketball Champions League delivered one of Europe's best games of 2025-26. AEK dominated the first half, leading 42-25 at the break. They took over the third quarter too, building a steady 20-point lead. But give Rytas ten minutes, and they'll give you the world. The team name means "morning" in Lithuanian, after a progressive newspaper launched the day after Lithuania left the USSR, and a 35-17 late run on Saturday night turned the moon out. Zalgiris, Rytas' eternal rivals in the LKLasico, were eliminated from the EuroLeague playoffs 24 hours earlier by Fenerbahce, but the juodai baltai raudoni still had a much tinier something to play for. Isn't it great to win? Aren't trophies fun, even if they don't mean anything? It's worth mentioning here at the end that the NBA Europe project, such as it is, will end up as some kind of partnership between the Association and FIBA. As it stands, this competition would continue as a kind of continental G League. “Basketball," CEO Patrick Comninos said at a state-of-the-BCL media gathering before the title game, "is already confusing enough for your average fan."