Mornar Bar

Mornar Bar go into this season in the Montenegrin Prva A Liga still chasing the one thing that has eluded them domestically since 2018: the cup.

That title, taken in 2017–18 with a final win over Budućnost, remains the club's single peak. Everything else in its cabinet reads as second place — a Balkan League final lost in 2016 — which makes the one season they got over the line stand apart rather than blend in.

The club grew out of Bar in 1974, took the sponsored name Mornar Barsko zlato in September 2021 after a deal with the local brewery, and later reverted to its original name once that arrangement ended. Fifty years on, it still plays out of the Topolica Sport Hall, a 3,500-seat arena that opened in 2009 and can be pushed to 4,000 for the games that call for it.

Regionally, the club has pushed further than its size might suggest: an ABA League semi-final in 2020–21, the same season it reached the Top 16 of the EuroCup, and a quarter-final run in the FIBA Europe Cup back in 2017–18. Those are the nights Mornar have punched above a small port town's weight, even if the domestic trophy has kept slipping away at the same stage, one final short.

Eight cup finals, one league title: that is the arithmetic Bar's side carries into another year of trying to turn a familiar runners-up finish into something else.