In the 2023/2024 season, “Prometey”, within BKT EuroCup group round, will start writing the history of its relations with five clubs at once. These are “Hapoel Tel Aviv” from Israel, “Paris” (France), “London Lions” (Great Bretain), Turkish “Besiktas” and “Wolves Vilnius” from Lithuania.
“On paper”, Israeli “Hapoel Tel Aviv” seems one of our group favourites. Last season, the team from Israel stopped at the EuroCup quarterfinal stage losing on the road to Spanish “Joventut”. In its own country’s championship, “Hapoel” managed to create a worthy competition to the Euroleague participant “Maccabi Tel-Aviv”. In the final series up to two wins, “Hapoel” lost the first match, attained a devastating victory in the second one and lost by just 4 points in the decisive third match. The main “Hapoel” news of the recent days was the signing a new two-year contract with the excellent shooter Javier manford (15.1 points in 19 last year’s EuroCup matches with 42.5% accuracy of the three-pointers).
Unlike “Hapoel”, Turkish “Besiktas” performed poorly in their championship (14th place in the regular season). In the off-season, Dusan Alimpijevic, familiar to “Prometey” fans by his work in “Bursaspor”, led the team. At the moment, the club is doing active transfer work aiming to bounce back to their best times (“Besiktas” is the double Turkey champion and the winner of the Challenge Cup of the 2011/2012 season). Along with Alimpijevic, Derek Needham, who became the champion of Ukraine as part of “Khimik” Yuzhne, also moved to Istanbul. Just last week, "Besiktas" signed five great players. It is interesting that one of them, shooter Matt Mitchell (14.6 points in the French championship) defended the colours of French “Strassbourg” together with “Prometey” rookie Marcus Keene.
“Paris” and “London Lions” are the clubs, the ultimate goal of which is to make it to the Euroleague. This is not surprising, considering the fact that the clubs represent the capitals of two economically and politically developed European countries. In the offseason, "Paris" was led by the Finnish specialist Tuomas Iisalo, who had a great season with the German "Bonn Telecom". From the same club, centers Michael Kessens and Leon Kratzer moved to “Paris”.
“London lions” finaly became the best team of Great Britain. Now, it is time to succeed in the Euro Cup. The club managed to keep the backbone of last year’s team (guards Tarik Phillip, Mo Soluade, Jordan Taylor, forward Sam Dekker, center Josh Sharma), which, for sure, will be supplemented by cool newbies.
“Wolves Vilnius” is also an ambitious project, created in Latvia just a year ago. In their debut season, “Wolves” sat in third place of Latvian regular championship. However, later they did not manage to overcome the first playoffs barrier losing 0:2 to “Jonava”. At the moment, the team is led by Kestutis Kemzura, ex-leader of the Lithuanian national team. The club has a very strong financial background. Currently, it is selecting performers with the aim of reaching at least the playoffs of the Eurocup.
