Klosterneuburg Dukes

Klosterneuburg sits on the Danube just north of Vienna, a town better known for its Augustinian monastery and vineyards than for sport, but for seven decades its basketball hall at the Freizeitzentrum Happyland has been the one place where the town gathers to shout about something other than wine. The club began in 1952 as the basketball section of the local football association, split off a year later as its own body, and in 1970 reached the Austrian First Division, a place it has never since left.

The defining stretch came after 1977, when a merger with the local club Asturia produced BK Klosterneuburg outright. The 1978 title broke thirty years of Viennese dominance of the championship, and what followed is still unmatched in the country: eight consecutive titles from 1983 to 1990. That run ended not on the court but on a road to Hungary, when a van carrying players to a tournament crashed in August 1990, seriously injuring five of them. The club spent years afterward rebuilding around youth players rather than the star names it could no longer afford.

It took until 2012 for Klosterneuburg to reach the top again, and that year they did something only one other Austrian club had managed, winning the league, cup and supercup together. A restructuring in 2004 had already given the men's side the name Dukes, worn under a rotating cast of sponsor names that has included Toshiba, Nissan and Xion along the way. The old rivalries persist regardless of what the shirt says: the Lower Austria derby against Traiskirchen Lions, and the Danube derby against BC Hallmann Vienna.

Moritz Lanegger has become the closest thing the current Dukes have to a constant, first arriving in 2011 and returning in 2018 to a club still living somewhat in the shadow of the team his predecessors built in the eighties.