Euroleague

The Euroleague is a high-caliber professional basketball league with teams from all over Europe.

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The Euroleague was established by ULEB, the Union of European Leagues of Basketball, which in turn was created by a group of 24 elite club teams. Most of the founding clubs came from Spain, Italy and Greece.

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The Euroleague is currently contested in four phases.

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The first phase is the regular season, in which 24 teams, divided into three groups of eight, participate. Each team plays two games (home-and-home) against every other team in its group. At the end of the regular season, the field is cut from 24 to 16; the surviving teams are divided into four groups.

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The second phase, known as the Top 16, then begins. As in the regular season, each Top 16 group is contested in a double round-robin format.

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New for the 2004-05 season was a quarterfinal round. Before, only the group winners advanced to the Final Four (see below). Now, the first- and second-place teams from each group advance. In the quarterfinal round, the first-place team from each group is matched against a second-place team from another group in a best-of-three series, with two of the three possible games scheduled at the first-place team's home court.

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The Final Four, held at a predetermined site, features the winners of the four quarterfinal series in one-off knockout matches. The semifinal losers play for third place; the winners play for the championship.

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The 2005 Final Four was held in Moscow, Russia. The semifinals took place on May 6, with the third-place and championship games on May 8. The following teams were involved:

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• CSKA Moscow
• Maccabi Tel Aviv
• TAU Cer?mica (Spain) (official club name: Saski Baskonia, or simply Baskonia)
• Panathinaikos (Greece)

The semifinal matchups were:

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• CSKA 78-85 TAU Cer?mica
• Maccabi 91-82 Panathinaikos

In the final, Maccabi successfully defended its title, defeating TAU 90-78. The third-place game saw Panathinaikos erase a 22-point deficit in the third quarter and go on to defeat the hosts CSKA 94-91 in double overtime.

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The 2006 Final Four will be held at Sazka Arena in Prague, Czech Republic.

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Euroleague: Teams of 2005-2006 Euroleague ►



 

Basketball: Basketball is a ball sport in which, under organized rules, two teams of five players each try to score points by throwing a ball through a hoop....

Europe: :This article is about the continent. For other meanings, see Europe (disambiguation)....

ULEB: The ULEB (Union of European Leagues of Basketball) was founded in 1991, with the aim to help the cooperation and development of European professional basketball leagues. Nowadays the leagues of Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, England, France and Switzerland form the ULEB....