Basketball Bundesliga 2026/27 (M)

The competition was born in 1939 and turned professional in 1966, but its modern history fits into two blocks. The first is ALBA Berlin at the end of the nineties: seven consecutive titles between 1997 and 2003, a team playing in the Max-Schmeling-Halle that Germany started measuring against Europe's best. The second arrived straight afterwards and from the south: Bamberg strung together nine championships between 2004 and 2017, carried by an industrial sponsor and by a crowd that filled an arena in a city of seventy thousand.

Nobody has ruled like that since. Bayern Munich moved into basketball with the financial muscle of their football side and have taken several titles, but none of them has built a comparable run. The result is a league that is unusual by European standards: eighteen clubs, real promotion and relegation with the ProA, and a list of champions that has changed hands more often in twenty years than in the forty before them.

ALBA Berlin and Bayern Munich met where everyone expected — in the final — and were separated by the smallest possible margin: 3-2, with a fifth game deciding a title neither had locked up beforehand. ALBA came through the top half after suffering in both previous rounds; Bayern arrived far more comfortably.

The route explains a lot about how this league works. In the quarter-finals ALBA needed five games to see off Rasta Vechta, a club from a village of thirteen thousand that plants itself among the last eight every year. Bamberg swept Ratiopharm Ulm 3-0, and Telekom Baskets Bonn knocked out Würzburg 3-2 before running into Bayern in the semi-finals, where they lost 3-0.

In the other bracket ALBA stretched the series again: 3-2 over Bamberg. Four of the playoff's seven series went the distance, which is the best summary of a season in which no team was clearly better than the rest.

Eighteen teams, thirty-four rounds and 306 regular-season games between 18 September and 9 May. ALBA Berlin start as champions and Bayern Munich as the team with more than enough budget not to be; between them they take almost all the attention, even if neither of the last two playoff rounds was settled comfortably.

The only change to the grid is a straight swap: Phoenix Hagen come up, reclaiming a place in the top flight, and MLP Academics Heidelberg go down. The rest are clubs that have been there for years — Telekom Baskets Bonn, EWE Baskets Oldenburg, Ratiopharm Ulm, MHP Riesen Ludwigsburg, Rasta Vechta — plus the three eastern sides that redrew the league's map: Rostock Seawolves, BV Chemnitz 99 and Mitteldeutscher BC.

The real fight is not only at the top. With a single relegation place, the bottom of the table is alive until May, and the teams chasing the eight playoff spots number at least twice the places available.

The regular season is a double round-robin: every team plays thirty-four games, home and away against each rival. When it ends, the top eight go into the playoffs and the bottom club is relegated to the ProA, whose champion comes up in their place.

The playoff is what sets this league apart from those settled in single games: all three rounds — quarter-finals, semi-finals and final — are best-of-five. That means becoming champion takes nine wins on top of thirty-four games, and that a badly started series can be turned around, as four of last year's seven ties going to a decider makes clear.

Regular-season position matters because of home advantage: the higher seed opens and closes at home, and in a five-game format that fifth game at home is worth a whole season's effort. Which is why the last rounds in April are not a formality even for teams whose playoff place is already safe.