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The Euroleague is a high-caliber professional basketball league with teams from all over Europe.
The Euroleague was established by ULEB, the Union of European Leagues of Basketball, which in turn was created by a group of 24 elite club teams. Most of the founding clubs came from Spain, Italy and Greece.
The Euroleague is currently contested in four phases.
The first phase is the regular season, in which 24 teams, divided into three groups of eight, participate. Each team plays two games (home-and-home) against every other team in its group. At the end of the regular season, the field is cut from 24 to 16; the surviving teams are divided into four groups.
The second phase, known as the Top 16, then begins. As in the regular season, each Top 16 group is contested in a double round-robin format.
New for the 2004-05 season was a quarterfinal round. Before, only the group winners advanced to the Final Four (see below). Now, the first- and second-place teams from each group advance. In the quarterfinal round, the first-place team from each group is matched against a second-place team from another group in a best-of-three series, with two of the three possible games scheduled at the first-place team's home court.
The Final Four, held at a predetermined site, features the winners of the four quarterfinal series in one-off knockout matches. The semifinal losers play for third place; the winners play for the championship.
The 2005 Final Four was held in Moscow, Russia. The semifinals took place on May 6, with the third-place and championship games on May 8. The following teams were involved:
The semifinal matchups were:
In the final, Maccabi successfully defended its title, defeating TAU 90-78. The third-place game saw Panathinaikos erase a 22-point deficit in the third quarter and go on to defeat the hosts CSKA 94-91 in double overtime.
The 2006 Final Four will be held at Sazka Arena in Prague, Czech Republic.
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*2001 was a transition year, with the best European teams split into two major leagues (Suproleague held by FIBA, Euroleague by ULEB). Suproleague 2001 was won by Maccabi Tel-Aviv (Israel).
| Team | Country | Cups |
|---|---|---|
| Real Madrid | Spain | 8 |
| Pallacanestro Varese | Italy | 5 |
| CSKA Moscow | USSR | 4 |
| Maccabi Tel-Aviv | Israel | 4* |
| Olimpia Milan | Italy | 3 |
| ASK Riga | USSR | 3 |
| KK Split | Yugoslavia | 3 |
| Panathinaikos Athens | Greece | 3 |
| Cibona Zagreb | Yugoslavia | 2 |
| Virtus Bologna | Italy | 2 |
| Pallacanestro Cantù | Italy | 2 |
| Virtus Roma | Italy | 1 |
| Bosna Sarajevo | Yugoslavia | 1 |
| CSP Limoges | France | 1 |
| FC Barcelona | Spain | 1 |
| Joventut Badalona | Spain | 1 |
| Olympiacos | Greece | 1 |
| Partizan Belgrade | Yugoslavia | 1 |
| Tbilisi | USSR | 1 |
| Žalgiris Kaunas | Lithuania | 1 |
* excluding the Suproleague victory of 2001
| Country | Cups |
|---|---|
| 13 | |
| 10 | |
| 8 | |
| 7 | |
| 4 | |
| 4* | |
| 1 | |
| 1 |
* excluding Maccabi Tel-Aviv's Suproleague victory of 2001
Note that the Pallacanestro Cantù, that won the European Champions Cup twice is the team of a small city of only 35.172 inhabitans, located in the Milano Metropolitan Area, 25 km north of the main city. Few miles western at 40 km from Milano there is the city of Varese (only 82,282 inhabitants), that won 5 European Champions Cups with the Pallacanestro Varese. So in a small area of less than 40 km in the Northern Metropolitan Area of Milano there are 3 teams that won totally 10 European Champions Cup and played totally 16 finals of the same cup!