IN THE GAME

If the powerful ACB/HEBA front manages to make its influence count and is able to prevent Jordi Bertomeu’s proposed Euroleague system from being set in stone, our efforts to cover the the story might be to no avail. But we’ll do it anyway, who knows what’s going to happen next.

There were clarifications this week about the handling of the new system in several domestic leagues. Firstly, according to Ballineurope, French ProA is different from all other leagues in assigning the Euroleague starting spots, not only for the ASVEL Villeurbanne wildcard. The French champion will receive the first B-licence of course, however, it is not the finalist that will receive another B-licence, but the regular season winner, which is in fact ASVEL. A nice way of upgrading the regular season and giving teams another goal to work for, apart from an advantage going into the playoffs, which in my opinion is not enough of an reward for a 30 plus X games regular season, and which can be neutralised by a single game.

The national rankings of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, which include Adrialeague results, seem to be the only domestic/regional rankings that will be respected by the new Euroleague system. The rankings of e.g. Italy, France and Germany do not seem to count for Euroleague qualification anymore, but they might be of importance for the EuroCup.

Lottomatica Roma and Virtus Bologna both went out in the quarter finals of the Lega A playoffs, but Roma is going to keep its A-licence. In fact, the failure of the bigs enables Italy more spots for the Euroleague next season: Benetton has already won at least the 3rd B-licence [qualification round] as they have the 2nd best regular season record of all semifinalists, so that they should finish 3rd in the final standings even if they lose their semifinal series. Between the two losing semifinalists, regular season record determines who is to be ranked higher in the final standings. The thing is, if one of Efes Pilsen/Fenerbahce wins the Turkish championship, which is extremely probable right now [both being up 2:0 in their respective semifinal series], Italy will have three direct starters, in case Montepaschi does not qualify for the playoff finals, even four.

Let’s just for one moment assume the probable, some might call it the inevitable:

1) Montepaschi wins the Italian championship
2) Efes Pilsen and Fenerbahce qualify for the finals in Turkey

The field of participants would look as follows.

Direct qualification:

Qualification round:

*In case ASVEL wins the French championship, the 2nd placed team of the ProA regular season will take this spot

Read here and here in order to understand the system.

I had been misevaluating the qualification round a bit it seems. It looks quite makeable in this case. Khimki would be obvious favourites, followed by the 3rd placed teams from Greece and Italy, but it would make for very interesting games.