Basketball team

Rubon

Club · Belarus · Premier League

«Rubon»

245 Matches

121 wins

124 losses

20072–19517 Points

+555 Difference

81.9 Average per match

Form L W W L L W

Rubon go into the current Belarusian Premier League season as the club that has finished on the podium more often than almost anyone without ever taking the title itself, and last season did nothing to change that habit: a bronze medal, its fourth in the club's history, kept the run alive. There is no obvious reason to expect this year will be the one that finally breaks the pattern, but Vitebsk has learned not to write the team off.

That habit of finishing second or third took shape early. Silver in the 1997/98 championship, silver again in 2003/04, then bronze the following season set the tone for a club that has stayed in the top flight since it first appeared there. The Belarusian Cup has followed the same script, runners-up four times and third-placed three times, the trophy itself always going elsewhere. Grodno-93, Borisfen Mogilev and, above all, Tsmoki-Minsk have usually been the ones in the way.

Tsmoki-Minsk's dominance made the 2022/23 season worth remembering for a different reason: Rubon beat them in the quarterfinals, an upset that had nothing to do with the club's final placing of fourth that year but everything to do with how the club is spoken about since. The name itself carries its own piece of local history — an old Slavic word for the Western Dvina, the river that runs through Vitebsk, adopted only in 2011 after years under the Lokomotiv banner tied to a founding sponsor. Home games are still played in front of a few hundred people at most, the Vitebsk Central Sports Complex holding just 330 seats.

Ruslan Boydakov has coached the team since 2009, long enough to have overseen most of the recent medals himself. A former Best Basketball Player of Belarus as a player, he has spent longer on Rubon's bench than most coaches in the league get anywhere.

Latest results

Fixtures and results

14 Oct	Premier League	Grodno H	78:70	W
10 Oct	Premier League	Gomel H	74:77	L
2 Oct	Premier League	Borisfen A	81:84	L
29 Sep	Premier League	Tsmoki-Minsk H	79:73	W
26 Sep	Premier League	Brest A	86:80	W
30 May	Premier League	Borisfen H	84:88	L