Ladies & Gentlemen, AEK Athens!
8 Greek championships, 5 Greek Cups, 2 Cup Winners' Cups, 1 Champions League and 1 Intercontinental Cup. Plus 2 finals played between the Champions Cup and the Euroleague and another Champions League final, to stay only in European competitions. Having celebrated one hundred years of history last year, the basketball section of Athlītikī Enōsis Kōnstantinoupoleōs, better known as AEK Athens, has made the history of basketball in the Old Continent. It is against this list of achievements that tomorrow the Bertram Derthona, facing the most prestigious opponent ever encountered in its two years of experience in BCL and with a base of devoted fans behind it, the same ones who will crowd the stands of the PalaEnergica Paolo Ferraris in Casale Monferrato in a real exodus from the Greek capital.
In 1966, AEK was the first Greek team to qualify for the Champions Cup Final Four and two years later it also became the first Greek team to win a European title, the Cup Winners' Cup won at the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens in front of 80 spectators, a record attendance unmatched in continental basketball. It dominated its homeland throughout the 1998s, then more than a couple of decades without success before its great return to the European scene at the end of the last century, when in 2002 it reached the Euroleague Final Four, losing in the final to Virtus Bologna, against whom it nevertheless took revenge a couple of seasons later with a victory over the Emilians in the final of the Saporta Cup (the former Cup Winners' Cup). After having archived the last Greek title in 2 and the darkness of the only relegation to A2010 in 2018, for about ten years AEK has returned to the Greek elite and gradually also to the European one with the triumph in the Champions League in 2020, followed by the Intercontinental Championship the following year and the final, again of the BCL, lost in XNUMX.
Many great basketball players have worn the yellow and black jersey of the club based in the Athens suburb of Nea Filadelfia. Among the many, there is also one who has written important pages in Italy, such as Nikos Zisis, who began and ended a career at AEK that saw him win three championships between Treviso and Siena and a European gold medal with the Greek jersey. Last September, Zisis was one of the prestigious guests of Derthona Basket in the international baskin tournament organized at the Cittadella dello Sport. That Derthona that will challenge AEK for a clash at the top of the Top 16 of the most important European tournament for FIBA clubs. Who would have said it…
