The currently crashed top team from Alba Berlin will play at BG Göttingen on Sunday.
Göttingen – Their success story is one with almost no end: eleven times German champions, eleven times cup winners – both most recently in 2022. Plus countless awards and other good placings such as the 1995 victory in the Korac Cup, a forerunner of today’s Euro competitions . But this season Alba Berlin is just starving. The Crash of the Albatrosses.
So the Alba game in Göttingen next Sunday will seriously be a relegation duel. It’s hard to believe, because bottom team BG is expecting the third-to-last team from the federal capital. The starting position is completely different than in previous years, when the Albatrosses came to southern Lower Saxony as high flyers and one of the leading first division teams and, with a few exceptions, took the points from the leash to the Spree.
Currently the record is not as sad as that of the Violets (only one win), but it is still very disappointing with only three wins and six defeats in the Bundesliga. The interim balance in the Euroleague is just as poor with only three wins and 13 defeats. Bottom in the strongest European league.
The most important reason for the crash was probably the terrible injury situation. The US boy Matt Thomas, who was intended to be the leading figure, has only played once. Ziga Samar only played three matches, Malte Delow, who had become a regular player, was on the floor twice. Louis Olinde, the son of the Göttingen ASC legend Wilbert Olinde, was able to play eight of the nine games so far, as were other top performers such as the Norwegian Martin Hermannsson, who returned from Valencia (top scorer with 12.6 points on average), US big man Trevion Williams ( 12.1 / from Ulm), the Italian Matteo Spagnolo (11.0) and the New Zealander Yannick Wetzell (10.7). Many problems for the Spanish coach Israel Gonzales, who is trying to master the difficult phase with composure and sovereignty. Alba recently signed American David McCormack to add more offensive threat.
Can the BG now benefit from the fact that the Berliners are playing two difficult Euroleague games this week? On Tuesday, Alba played at home against Zalgiris Kaunas (66:86). “It was the worst performance I’ve seen from Alba,” complained MagentaSport expert Pascal Roller. “Very frightening, quite piecemeal.”
On Friday Alba has a stressful trip to Olympiacos Piraeus. The Greek Euroleague fifth team will play at 8:15 p.m. Return journey on Saturday certainly straight to Göttingen including overnight stay, game starts on Sunday at 3 p.m. in the S-Arena. Do the Violets even have a chance against struggling Albatrosses this time? (Helmut Anschütz/gsd)
