Tonight’s game between Cazoo Baskonia Vitoria-Gasteiz and FC Barcelona will mark the 25th meeting between them in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague and they have evenly split their previous clashes. Some of those games have featured all-time greats of European basketball. Let’s take a look back at the history of their showdowns.
In the first decade of the century, the teams rarely met since teams from the same country were by design drawn into different regular season groups. Their first game was the third-place game at the 2006 Final Four in Prague, which Baskonia took 82-87 behind 19 points from Predrag Drobnjak. Juan Carlos Navarro and Gregor Fucka scored 20 points apiece in defeat.
Three years later, they dueled in the best-of-five EuroLeague Playoff series that went the distance. Baskonia won Game 1 on the road and 3 at home to take a 2-1 lead, but Barcelona won the next two, including a 78-62 Game 5 victory in which Ersan Ilyasova and Navarro each scored 19 and Ilyasova added 10 rebounds to advance to the Final Four. Ilyasova starred for Barcelona with three double-doubles in the series. Igor Rakocevic led Baskonia with 16.4 points per game in the series.
The next six EuroLeague games between them were all in the Top 16s of 2013, 2014 and 2016. Barcelona swept the games in the first of those years and Baskonia did the same in the last. In 2014, they split road wins.
Since 2016 and the introduction of the round-robin format, the teams have met on the regular in the regular season. Baskonia edged Barca 65-62 in their first regular-season game in December 2016. It was part of a seven-game winning streak for Baskonia over Barcelona that lasted from April 2014 through March 2018.
Among their famous showdowns was the 2014 Top 16 finale in which Andres Nocioni scored 37 points to lead Baskonia to an 86-97 triumph in Barcelona. That game marked the highest-scoring game between the teams and Nocioni’s output was also the most in this rivalry.