Zlatorog Laško

Laško is a town on the Savinja river, better known outside Slovenia for its brewery than for producing a basketball club that once reached the group stage of the EuroLeague. That run, in the 1999–00 season, followed a league runner-up finish the year before, when the team also went as far as the Saporta Cup quarter-finals.

The club started out in 1969 as KK Laško, then spent over a decade as KK Pivovarna Laško once the local brewery became its sponsor, before reverting to Zlatorog in 2006. The brewery's backing shaped the club through that spell and remains its main sponsor today. Home games are played at Dvorana Tri Lilije.

Boštjan Nachbar came through the club in the late 1990s and early 2000s before moving on to an NBA career, and Samo Udrih followed a similar path out of Laško on his way to representing Slovenia at the 2010 FIBA World Championship. Between them, those years produced the club's best basketball, even if the trophies came later and smaller: the Slovenian Cup in 2004 and the Alpe Adria Cup in 2017–18.

Runner-up finishes have piled up either side of that single cup win — in the league in 1998–99, 1999–00, 2003–04 and 2015–16, and in the Slovenian Cup on seven occasions. Zlatorog has kept producing players, most recently through academy graduates such as Alen Omić and Miha Lapornik, who both moved on to careers abroad. What the club has not done since 2004 is turn any of that development, or those near-misses against Krka and Rogaška, into a second domestic title.