Akita

Latest results

Standing

Basketball team

Club · Japan · B League

«Happinets»

361 Matches

158 wins

203 losses

27307–28116 Points

−809 Difference

75.6 Average per match

Form L W L L L W

When Takuya Nakayama let his go in 2024, it was the kind of moment Akita's fans had learned to expect from a club that spent its first years fighting to be taken seriously outside the city. The corporate entity behind the team was registered in January 2009, and by September that year it had a name, Akita Northern Happinets, ready for entry into the bj league as an expansion side for the 2010–11 season.

The colours were chosen with the region in mind: pink for happiness, gold for the rice that grows on the plains around the city, black for the northern landscape. The supporters took the first of those literally, calling themselves Crazy Pink. On the floor, the club's best spell came under Makoto Hasegawa, who had arrived as player-manager in that inaugural season and later returned as head coach to lead Akita to back-to-back bj league Eastern Conference titles in 2014 and 2015.

The move into the unified B.League in 2016 did not go smoothly. Akita dropped into the second-tier B2 League after that first season and needed two years to climb back, beating the Kumamoto Volters in the promotion playoffs in 2018. Kenzo Maeda, in charge since 2019, eventually got the club into the B.League playoffs for the first time in 2022. Three Tohoku Cup wins, in 2012, 2013 and 2025, sit alongside those conference titles as the club's main silverware, won against opponents from across the same northern region — chief among them Sendai 89ers, whose meetings with Akita are still billed as the Tohoku Derby.

None of it changes what the club was built to do from the start: give Akita City, a place with no top-flight team before 2010, a side worth naming after it.

Fixtures and results

11 Oct	B League	Utsunomiya Brex A	82:71	W
8 Oct	B League	Brave Thunders H	81:87	L
4 Oct	B League	Tokyo Sunrockers A	76:86	L
3 Oct	B League	Tokyo Sunrockers A	63:90	L
27 Sep	B League	Sendai 89ers A	75:73	W
26 Sep	B League	Sendai 89ers A	55:81	L

Koshigaya Alphas

Ibaraki Robots

Altiri Chiba

Brave Thunders

B League

Group stage · Eastern Conference