Poitiers

The 2009 Pro B final gave Poitiers a 67–54 win over CSP Limoges that sent the club up to Pro A and handed the finals MVP award to Pierre-Yves Guillard. The following season the club made the most of the promotion, finishing eighth in Pro A and knocking out the reigning champions, ASVEL, in the playoffs before Cholet Basket ended the run.

Poitiers Basket 86 did not exist before 2004; it was formed that year out of two Poitiers sides, CEP Poitiers and Stade Poitevin, and started life in the third tier, Nationale 3. A single season later it had won promotion, and by 2005–06 it topped Nationale 1, opening a run of results that carried it into professional basketball within two years of the merger.

Pro B kept returning as the club's level, with runner-up finishes in 2008 against Besançon Basket Doubs and again in 2014 against Boulazac Basket Dordogne, either side of a Pro A spell that ended with relegation in 2012–13 after a sixteenth-place finish.

What the club has leaned on more consistently is its academy. Evan Fournier came through it before his two seasons with the first team in 2010–11 and 2011–12, ahead of his move to the NBA, and Moustapha Fall started his professional career at the club the following year. Sylvain Maynier gave the other side of that story, a captain who stayed long enough to retire from the club after its 2009–10 Pro A season.

The nearest fixture on the calendar remains the one against La Rochelle, still called simply the derby. What has not returned since 2009 is a season back in the top division.