Bakken remain the trailblazers of Danish basketball

AARHUS (Basketball Champions League) – By overcoming the obstacle of BC Tartu in Qualification Round 2 and securing a spot in the Regular Season of the Basketball Champions League, Bakken Bears have once again set an important milestone for Danish basketball in Europe.

It is familiar ground for the team from Aarhus, although they arrived here through a process of change. In the 2015/16 season, Bakken achieved the memorable feat of winning their Regular Season group in the FIBA Europe Cup on a perfect 6-0 record. Despite falling in the next stage of the competition, their campaign was already deemed to be a significant European success for a Danish club.

But Bakken are not just any Danish club and when they went on to finish second in the Danish Basketligaen Regular Season and then failed to retrieve the championship crown from Horsens IC, changes had to be made. Since the turn of the century, this was the first time the Bears failed to win the league title two years in a row.

The club decided to maintain the core of the squad but perform a surgical change by returning to a tried and tested recipe which had produced great results up until 2012. The familiar face of well-respected Danish tactician Steffen Wich, who had together with General Director Michael Piloz helped build up Bakken Bears all those years ago, came back to assume again the reins of Bakken following a three-year stretch of foreign coaches at the helm.

On Thursday night, after his team had prevailed 83-70 over Tartu to seal their passage to the Basketball Champions League in triumphant fashion, coach Wich could have boasted of his success but instead he gracefully gave all the credit to his closest associate.

“We have to remember that my associate head coach, Mathias Bach, is the brains behind these two wins over Tartu,” Wich said. “He’s actually responsible for us qualifying, [as well as] Michel Diouf who is a great player that kind of defines our team both on and off the court.”

Diouf had already delivered great performances for Bakken last year and formed almost immediately a powerful front-court duo with 36-year-old veteran Nicolai Iversen.

The legendary Danish big man returned to Bakken in 2011 and has played a huge part in the club’s success in Europe during these years but the Thursday win was so important that it put even a player of his experience in jubilant mood – and gave him the chance to deliver a tongue-in-cheek quote he undoubtedly had been preparing for some time.

“I've dreamt of playing in the Champions League since I was a kid,” Iversen said jokingly. “The difference is that back then I was a football goal-keeper and we played with more players.”