IN THE GAME

According to our partner site Talkbasket, there has been an agreement about the assignment of a direct qualification spot to BC Khimki Moscow in the Shareholders Executive Board meeting which took place in Barcelona yesterday.  Khimki qualified for the preliminaries via finishing second in Superleague last season, but the new agreement would see them receive the C-licence-wildcard by, as CSKA Moscow GM Andrej Valutin said, “being considered as EuroCup fnalist”. We cannot say whether or not this will be the rule for the next years, or whether it is just an important wildcard criteria.

Most interestingly, Valutin further said that the direct spot for Khimki has basically been agreed on, but that it will not be of official nature before the whole proposed Euroleague system will be approved in the assembly. This at least answers the question whether there will be another assembly, or the new system’s oppositions would have to go to law court in order to have a chance of stopping the proposed system from being implemented.

ACB and HEBA are the most famous opponents of the new system, but recently came another surprise in form of a statement by SLUC Nancy president Christian Fra, who announced that he will not give his vote for the proposed Euroleague system and that he will join the opposition front of “the ACB and several Italian and Greek clubs” [Fra]. Fra is seeing his club being treated unfairly after working hard for one of the top spots in the French domestic ranking, which would not have an effect anymore according to the proposed system, in the past three years.

After the French ProA season has been finished, Orleans will take the second French spot, while Le Mans will get the wildcard. Both clubs will have to attempt to qualify via the preliminaries.

Another interesting new aspect comes from Germany, where Berlin-based newspaper “Berliner Morgenpost” is not ruling out the possibility of ALBA taking the now vacant Khimki spot in the preliminary rounds. This would mean that not the country ranking, which has the second placed team from Serbia as the next candidate to qualify for a B-licence, determines the last remaining participant, but another wildcard.

Meanwhile, Maroussi Athens, the Greek team which participation had not been definite due to financial struggles, will play in the Euroleague [qualification tournament] after all, with the help of 300.000€ public subsidies by Maroussi municipality.

Anyway, here is an updated table of the current situation around the field of participants for the 09/10 season.

Directly qualified:

Qualification round:

Read here and here in order to understand the system.