Zadar KK

December in Zadar means one fixture on everyone's mind: the "Predbožićni derbi" against Cibona Zagreb, the pre-Christmas meeting that carries more weight than the league table around it ever suggests. Further south along the coast sits the other old grudge, with Split, the "Dalmatinski derbi" fought out between two cities that have never needed much encouragement to dislike one another. Both rivalries trace back to the Yugoslav era, when Zadar built the foundations of everything that came after.

The club grew out of a physical culture society formed in the city in 1945; the basketball side split off as its own entity six years later. Under Yugoslavia's first division it won six championships between 1965 and 1986, an era that produced Krešimir Ćosić, whose name the club's hall in Zadar now carries. Independence brought a different kind of test, and Zadar answered it by becoming the dominant force in Croatian basketball: six domestic league titles and nine Croatian Cups, more than any other club in the competition's history, with 2004–05 standing out as the year they took both in the same season.

The one continental night nobody in Zadar forgets came in 2003, when the club beat Maccabi Tel Aviv 91–88 in the ABA League Final Four in Ljubljana. Marko Popović was named the tournament's most valuable player, but it was Danijel Jusup on the bench who turned that run into a title and then kept building on it, adding Croatian Cups in the years that followed. Jusup remains the coach most associated with what Zadar became once the Yugoslav league was gone — the man who took a club still leaning on its old derbies and gave it a European night to point to as well.