Ventspils

Ventspils go into this season carrying the weight of a shortened trophy drawer in one competition and a full one in the other. In the Latvian Basketball League they are the standard against which every title is measured; in the Latvian Basketball Cup they arrive each year as the team to beat and leave as runners-up, having lost the final to VEF Riga in 2022, 2025 and again in 2026.

The league record explains why. Ten championships since the club's founding in 1994, seven of them taken in a row between 2000 and 2006. Two further titles came in 2009 and 2014, and a tenth in 2018.

VEF Riga is the rival that matters, in the league and now repeatedly in the cup final, and the fixture carries the same weight in the Latvian-Estonian League, where Ventspils also measure themselves against Estonia's BC Kalev/Cramo. Historically BC Barons filled that role before VEF took it over.

The club's reputation rests as much on the players it produced as on the banners it won. Dairis Bertāns and Jānis Timma came through the Ventspils system before their careers took them further. Home games are played in front of just over 3,000 people at the Ventspils Olympic Center, a small hall by continental standards but one that has hosted a decade of championship basketball.

None of that was assured in 1994, when the club was formed in a port city better known for its ice-free harbour than for producing national-team players.