Rytas

In 1997 the newspaper Lietuvos rytas bought a Vilnius club that had been playing under the name BC Statyba since 1963 and put its own name on the shirts. Nobody guessed then that the renamed side would spend the next quarter-century trading championships with the team across the country in Kaunas, but that is what followed: Rytas and Žalgiris have met so often, in finals and in ordinary league rounds, that the fixture carries its own name, the Lithuanian derby, and neither side has ever treated it as an ordinary game.

Rytas won its first Lithuanian Basketball League title in 2000 and has taken six more since, in 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2022 and 2024 — the gap between the fifth and sixth telling its own story of a club that fell away and found its way back. The 2009 season stands apart: alongside the domestic title, Rytas won the EuroCup, the only European trophy in the club's cabinet, having already collected the ULEB Cup four years earlier.

Šarūnas Marčiulionis and Šarūnas Jasikevičius both wore the black, white and red before either became the name outsiders associate with Lithuanian basketball abroad, and Jonas Valančiūnas passed through the same colours before his career took him to the NBA. The club shortened its name to simply Rytas in 2018, keeping the wolf of the Vilnius legend and the outline of Gediminas Castle on its badge.

Most league nights are still played at the Active Vilnius Arena, a ground that holds 2,741 people — a capacity the club leaves behind only for the derby and for European nights, when it moves into the far larger Arena Vilnius instead.