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The Champions League closes its door to UCAM

Augusto Lima, with UCAM Murcia, in the 2018 Final Four in Athens. | FIBA / BCL PRESS

UCAM Murcia CB decided to open a parenthesis in the planning for the next academic year until it knows the true scenario that it will have to face. After announcing the renewals of Nemanja Radovic and James Webb, the university team began a waiting period until they knew if they would finally reconcile the Endesa League and Basketball Champions League calendars next year. The European competition will communicate at the beginning of this week the complete list of the clubs that will participate in the 2021-2022 campaign, however, it seems that the options that the Murcian team had to return to Europe have been complicated after formalizing their registration at the end of the twelfth position of the CBA.

And it is that yesterday it was known that Unicaja Málaga, which until now had always played the Eurocup, will participate in the Basketball Champions League for the next three seasons. Which means that it will occupy one of the four places reserved for Spanish teams in the competition. To the Andalusian team we must add the presence of the tournament champions such as Hereda San Pablo Burgos and Lenovo Tenerife, so that Casademont Zaragoza, BAXI Manresa and UCAM Murcia itself are the clubs that would compete for the remaining place.

To this day, the scale to decide who will be the ‘winner’ of the European ticket is still unknown, since it is not clear whether the position of the classification at the end of the year in the Endesa League or the general ranking will be taken into account. of the Basketball Champions League. In any case, with the entry of Unicaja Málaga, and with only four places at stake, UCAM has lost a large part of its options.

For qualifying purposes in the ACB, BAXI Manresa is ahead of the Murcian team, which does surpass Casademont Zaragoza in this regard. However, in the Champions League ranking, it is the Aragonese team that appears (5th place) above the university team (25th). So UCAM Murcia would be ‘offside’ if either of these two criteria is adopted.

It would only open the door again to a competition that he already played from 2017 to 2019, getting the bronze medal in the Final Four in Athens, the possibility of expanding the places for Spanish teams, depending on the rest of the registrations. or possible rejections by other clubs. However, they should play the stage prior to the start of the group stage (regular stage) with up to three possible knockouts.

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