Atomerőmű Paks

When Atomerőmű Paks take on Kaposvár, the meeting carries the weight of a genuine rangadó — the two sides have spent years fighting for the same playoff places, and enough players have crossed between the clubs over time that neither side needs reminding what a defeat means. Games against Budapesti Honvéd sit a notch below in venom but not in stakes: both are the fixtures that tend to decide where the season ends up.

The club grew out of the workforce at the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, which gave it both its name and its identity as a company team long before it became a fixture of Hungarian basketball. It has since carried sponsorship from the state energy firm MVM, though locally it is simply ASE, or "Paksiak" — the Paks lot.

The best years came in a tight stretch through the 2000s, when the team took the national championship four times and matched that with four Hungarian Cups, the two runs of silverware overlapping almost exactly. Since then the club has settled into the upper half of the table without recapturing that run, which is what makes the earlier decade still the reference point whenever the current squad's form comes up.

Home games are played in front of crowds capped at around 1,200 at the ASE Sportcsarnok, a small enough hall that the red and blue of the club colours are hard to miss from any seat. It is a modest setting for a club that started life not as a civic project but as recreation for people who worked at the power station down the road.