Tours

Tours Métropole Basket spent the 2021 promotion campaign clawing its way back into Pro B, the tier below France's top flight, after years spent rebuilding a name that once carried real weight in French basketball. The current structure only took its shape that year, when the amateur wing split off and left TMB to chase a return to something closer to its old standing.

That standing was built in the 1970s and 1980s, when the club played as ASPO Tours. The line back to that era runs through 1938, when Gérard Guertin set up a basketball section inside the Patronage Laïque La Riche Lamartine — the root from which ASPO Tours, then NPO Tours, then Touraine Basket Club all eventually grew, each carrying the name through a different stretch of the club's history before the 2014 merger that produced Union Tours Basket Métropole.

Carl Nicks arrived at ASPO Tours after his NBA career had already run its course, and stayed long enough to be remembered as one of the imports who made those European nights matter. Stéphane Risacher belongs to the same lineage in a different way: his son Zaccharie went in the 2024 NBA draft, a name that keeps the family tied to the club decades on.

Games in Tours are played at Gymnase Monconseil, 1,200 seats, blue and white. The rivalry that means most locally is not the closest one on the map — Orléans sits nearer — but the fixture against Orléans is still the one Tours supporters mark on the calendar, a Centre-Val de Loire meeting that carries more weight than distance alone would suggest.