With the third championship in a row, Alba Berlin has crowned an extraordinary season in the basketball Bundesliga.
The last course of Jaleen Smith marked the start of the Berlin celebrations. 69 seconds were still to play late Sunday afternoon in the crowded and hot Munich Audi Dome when Alba Berlin’s winger left the floor. The Berlin basketball player stepped off the field with a jersey soaked in sweat – and a grin that couldn’t have been wider.
The receptionist on the bench: a euphoric Louis Olinde, an equally broad grin on Maodo Lo and Johannes Thiemann ready to be hugged. Just under a minute and a half later, the final siren sounded in Munich and Alba Berlin finally secured its third German championship in a row.
Alba Berlin wins third title in a row
Alba Berlin is German basketball champion for the third time in a row. After the surprisingly clear home defeat in game three, coach Israel Gonzalez’s team showed a completely different face in game four.more
The perfect reaction
Things had looked very different less than 48 hours earlier. With perhaps the worst performance of the season, the Berliners missed the first championship match point in the final against FC Bayern on Friday evening in their own sold-out hall. With cold sparkling wine and loaded confetti cannons, the 60:90 against the Bavarian rivals had no chance.
Not so on Sunday: In Munich, where Alba had already won the championship in the past two seasons, the Berliners played as if they had been changed. With a 96:81 victory against FC Bayern, who now had no chance for their part, the Berliners made the double of championship and cup victory perfect – in a game that in many ways symbolized Alba’s exceptionally good season.
It was said Jaleen Smith who provided the first image with symbolic character. On Friday, Smith had struggled as hard as in his first Alba months. After moving from Ludwigsburg, it took him a long time to settle into the Berlin system, which was new to him. But at some point he succeeded.
Over the course of the season, Smith became the key player Alba was hoping for and delivered in Sunday’s game four. After 90 seconds, the guard had single-handedly stopped Alba’s yield from game three with two threes. Smith followed up with four more long-range goals, sometimes from adventurous distances and despite good defence.
But another Berliner made a big contribution to the good Alba start on Sunday: Johannes Thiemann. Quite surprisingly, Alba coach Israel Gonzalez had sent him on the floor in place of Alba’s leader Luke Sikma at the beginning of the game. There Thiemann did what he has been doing for months: the forward scored with his back to the basket, shone as a passer, defended passionately and worked out rebounds.
When Bayern coach Andrea Trinchieri rubbed his forehead at 13-2 to Alba, as if suffering from a persistent migraine, Thiemann had scored seven points and set up Smith’s six points. “Thiemann has scored ten points. We have to stop him,” shouted Trinchieri shortly afterwards during a time-out. Another attestation for the large part that Thiemann, who was later awarded the most valuable player in the final series (MVP), had in Alba’s success.
Johannes Thiemann receives the trophy as MVP of the final series from his coach Israel Gonzalez.
The variability factor
But even apart from individual personal details, Alba’s performance in Munich showed why they deservedly been crowned champions for the third year in a row. The Berliners followed the credo preached by their new coach Israel Gonzalez over the course of the season, which focuses not on victories but on improving from game to game. And Alba responded almost perfectly to Friday’s shame. Defensively, they gave FC Bayern little room to maneuver.
Fast rotations, physical rebound work and the long Christ Koumadje as a tower in the zone were the recipe for success. Up front, Alba combined a brutal pace with a lot of fun in the game and a flow of play that was not even imaginable on Friday. Everything the Berliners had done wrong in the third final game, they did better in the fourth. With a score of 44:24 after a good 15 minutes, Alba hardly seemed to take the title away.
One factor for this: the variability that the team around Captain Sikma had already identified before the final series and had led to 19 wins in a row. Sikma himself switched and ruled on Sunday with ingenious allusions, during which he sometimes didn’t even look at his teammates. Maodo Lo, who played his way into the European guard elite in the best season of his career, unpacked his pace for the last time this season.
Oscar da Silva proved why he is currently being courted by FC Barcelona. Malte Delow, Alba’s next homegrown turned pro this season at the latest, shone with more than just his alley-oop allusion to Koumadje. The Israeli Tamir Blatt, who was often criticized at the start of the season, also showed the best form he has gradually found in the past few weeks and months with wonderful passes and cheeky three-pointers. “Everyone who played contributed an incredible amount,” commented Johannes Thiemann on the MagentaSport microphone after the end of the game. A sentence that could easily be the title of Berlin’s seasonal history at the same time.
Everyone who played contributed an incredible amount.
Successful break
And yet the injury-plagued Bavarians, who, including Vladimir Lucic, were missing four top performers, managed to cast a last spark of doubt about Alba’s sovereignty. A 9-0 run brought them back up to 15 points in the final quarter and might have caused Alba to get nervous in previous years. But not on Sunday. Jaleen Smith responded with lay-ups and three-pointers and, together with his team-mates, proved that Alba has learned this season at the latest to deal with difficult situations even more confidently.
Basically the same way the departures of summer 2021 were dealt with. Once again, Alba’s managers around sports director Himar Ojeda have managed to compensate for the departure of top performers à la Niels Giffey, Simone Fontecchio and Jayson Granger – not without problems, but nevertheless successfully. The fact that the departure of coach Aito Garcia Reneses, who had been so influential for years, was not more serious was due to his successor and former assistant.
Senate supports Alba Berlin in the search for a new venue
On Friday evening, Alba Berlin starts the final for the German championship in the Mercedes-Benz Arena. Shortly before, the sports senator said: If the Senate had not mediated, Alba would not have been able to play in the arena after April.more
Carried on hands
So the last scene with a symbolic character on Sunday was reserved for Israel Gonzalez. At the end of a season with 54 wins from 81 games in all competitions, it was the Spaniard who first gave his players their medals and was then carried on the hands of manager Marco Baldi and captain Sikma when the trophy was handed over.
A gesture that seems quite appropriate when you consider that the 47-year-old established the Berliners in his first season as head coach in the Euroleague, leading them to 19 wins in a row, the cup title and the eleventh championship in the club’s history . “It’s unbelievable,” said Gonzalez, who was usually so composed, after the trophy was handed over, and added: “My squad is fantastic and something like that can only happen if you work as hard every day as we did this year.”
At least on the national stage, Alba remains the measure of all things in German basketball. The Berliners have won three championships and two cup titles in the past three seasons. “It’s unbelievable how we’ve played the last three years,” commented Johannes Thiemann on Sunday. The record of Bayern, whose philosophy is more towards Europe, in the same period: a cup win. It’s a trophy distribution that not only puts a big grin on Jaleen Smith’s face at Alba and in Berlin.
Broadcast: evening show, June 20th, 2022, 7:30 p.m
