British Basketball League

Encyclopedia : B : BR : BRI : British Basketball League

The BBL logo

The British Basketball League is the top men's professional basketball league in the United Kingdom. The BBL runs two knockout competitions alongside the league championship: the National Cup and the BBL Trophy.

The BBL is not to be confused with the English Basketball League or the Scottish Basketball League, which effectively form the second tier of British basketball. There is currently no promotion or relegation between the EBL, SBL and BBL because of the franchise system in use in the BBL (although Plymouth Raiders were elected to the BBL from EBL in 2004).

Overview

The league, operating with 12 teams for the 2006-07 season, works on a round-robin basis. Each team will play each other four times, twice on home court and twice on the road, during the regular league season.

The post-season Playoffs sees the top eight teams from the regular season advance into a one-game knockout series. The team finishing in first place will play the lowest seeded eighth team (match 1), followed by second place against seventh (match 2), third place against sixth (match 3)and finally the fourth and fifth placed teams facing each other in match 4. The top seeded team in each game will have home court advantage, with the four winners then going onto to compete in the semi-finals.

Both semi-finals matches are played on the Saturday of the Finals Weekend, usually held during the first week of May at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham. The winners of match 1 play the winners of match 3 and match 2's winners play match 4 winners. The two winners will then face each other in the Playoff final on the Sunday of Finals Weekend, with the winners being crowned Playoff champions.

As well as the league Championship and Playoffs, the BBL also has under its juristiction the BBL Cup and the BBL Trophy, which are played alongside the regular season. In the 2005-06 season, Newcastle Eagles became only the third team ever to complete a "clean-sweep" of domestic Honours, when they won the league Championship, the BBL Cup, the BBL Trophy and the Playoffs all in one season.

Current BBL members

Worcester Wolves were elected from the EBL in 2006. The teams playing in the BBL for the 2006-07 season are:

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.