Unicaja, Tenerife, UCAM and Manresa will play in the Champions League
FIBA has announced the 28 teams that will take part in the Champions League next season and on this list there are four Spaniards: Unicaja, Lenovo Tenerife, Baxi Manresa and UCAM Murcia. The competition will be completed with four other teams who have passed the previous qualifying stage and may be joined by another ACB team. The best player in the Endesa League who will not play in the Euroleague (Real Madrid, Barça and Baskonia) or in the European Cup (Valencia Basket, Joventut and Gran Canaria), as well as is not included in the Champions League matches, is MoraBanc Andorra, which finished the season in 11th position, will be held in the previous round.
Thus, Unicaja will defend the title won last year in the Final Four in Belgrade. Antonio Jesús López Nieto, president of the Málaga team, already explained a few days ago that although the goal is to reach the Euroleague in the future, for the moment its present is in the competitions organized by FIBA.
There will be another Champions League classic – Lenovo Tenerife. that in the last “Final Four” he played in the final and that this, along with “San Pablo Burgos”, is the team with the most titles: it has two (2017 and 2022). UCAM Murcia, who took revenge in the semi-final of the ACB Final Four in Belgrade (where they lost to Unicaja 74–80), repeats in this competition in the same way as Baxi Manresa, that last season they made it to the Top 16, but in 2022 they played in the finals.
Among the 28 permanent teams that will compete in the Champions League are AEK, Rodas, Promitheus Patras and Peristeri (Greece), Tortona and Pallacanestro Reggiana (Italy), Falko Szombathely (Hungary), Phil Ostend (Belgium), Football bet FMP (Serbia), Galatasaray, Manisa Buyuksehir Beledierspor and Pinar Karsiyaka (Turkish), Hapoel Holon and Maccabi Ramat Gan (Israel), Igokea (Bosnia), King Szczecin and Slask Wroclaw (Poland), Nanterre and Saint-Quentin (France), 9ers Chemnitz, Rasta Vechta and Wurzburg (Germany), Rytas (Lithuania) and Riga (Latvia).
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