By Alex Madrid/ info@eurohoops.net
Ludwigsburg completed a great campaign last season. They reached the semifinals in the German Bundesliga Cup and also achieved the quarterfinals in the Basketball Champions League.
In the BCL the team coached by John Patrick advanced from the group stage after winning 8 of their 14 matches. They sent Neptunas Klaipeda home in the round of 16 before facing Banvit.
The Turkish squad needed their best defensive actuation in the second leg to defeat the Germans on the road. In that game, Ludwigsburg scored just 53 points, their lowest mark in Basketball Champions League. This is especially impressive if we consider that they finished as the fourth best offensive team in the competition. Banvit, the runner-up, meant the end of the road…
With leader Jack Cooley back in the NBA, 2017/2018 Basketball Champions League began really soon for Ludwigsburg. If they wanted to take part of the group stage the German side should overcome three previous rounds. First of all, Bosnia.
The team traveled to Sarajevo in late September to face historical KK Bosna Royal, the team that won a European championship in 1979 led by Hall of Famer Mirza Delibasic. But the glory years finished a long time ago. Coach Patrick’s men won both matches by a big difference (59 – 85 and 102 – 59). A team full of new faces showed how powerful they were twice in less than three days but it wasn’t their only superb performance in the competition by far.
Romania’s Cluj Napoca proved to be a challenge for Ludwigsburg. However, they got again two wins (78-72, 88-77) and got the ticket for the third and final qualification round. The Germans got what they wanted against Finish Kataja also by winning both games by a total of 24 points (70–90, 81–85).
And in their first game of the regular season, they destroyed the 1991 Saporta Cup winner PAOK by 33 points! The final score was 103-70 and turned many heads around Europe for a bunch of reasons.
First of all, it was the fifth biggest defeat of PAOK in the history of European Cups and ironically the point difference tied to score of the Greeks against another German team. Back in the 1997-98 season, PAOK was defeated by Alba Berlin 104-71 in the European Champions Cup, the previous version of the EuroLeague.
And this already the third time during the current Basketball Champions League season that Ludwigsburg wins a game by 30 or more points, after the two triumphs against Bosna.
Is there a pattern here? We will know next week…