Legia

Legia head into the season as reigning champions of Poland, having beaten out the field for the 2025 title — a run that puts the current squad, built around Marcel Ponitka and Raymond Cowels, under the kind of pressure that only comes with defending something. Andrzej Pluta was named Finals MVP in 2025, and the club will want him carrying that form into whatever comes next.

Basketball at Legia grew out of the multi-sport military club WKS Legia Warszawa in 1929, and the section carries that army lineage in its own name, Wojskowi — the Militarians. The war years shut it down; it came back in 1947 and built its championship pedigree in the decades that followed, taking the Polish title six times between 1956 and 1969 before the trophy dried up for more than half a century.

What sat in between those two championship eras was not quiet decline but outright collapse: financial trouble dropped the club out of the top-flight Basketball League after the 2002–03 season, and it took fourteen years to get back. The section was turned into a joint-stock company in 2014 under president Robert Chabelski, and that restructuring is what eventually got Legia back into the top division in 2017, laying the ground for the title in 2025.

The Polish Cup has followed a similar pattern — two wins in 1968 and 1970, then nothing until 2024, a trophy that arrived a year ahead of the championship and hinted at what was coming. Games at Hala OSiR Bemowo hold just 1,416 people, tight enough that European nights move to the larger Arena COS Torwar instead. A newer rivalry has grown with Dziki Warszawa since that club reached the top flight in 2023, giving the capital a derby it had not had before. For now, Legia's task is simple: hold what they have just won.