National Basketball League: San Lorenzo and Atenas, far from glory, play an all-or-nothing final to avoid relegation

Two hundred twenty-three days from the start of the 2022/23 season of National Basketball League“there will be no tomorrow” for Saint Lawrence it’s at Athens after tonight, when from 10pm they will face each other at the Roberto Pando de Boedo Sports Center (it will be broadcast by TyC Sports) in the fifth and decisive match of the series for the stay. The equation is as simple as it is lapidary for the two top champions of the competition: the winner will keep his place in the elite, the loser will fall to the Argentine championship.

With their backs to history and as if their scrolls were a piece of paper, these two teams traversed the countryside. And relying on the location, they have played this decisive series up to here: San Lorenzo won comfortably (99-65 and 90-81) the first two games at the Pando. But Athens recovered with an all-court victory (73-59) and another much tighter one (68-65) at the Carlos Cerutti Municipal Sports Center, from which they greeted last Tuesday, given that next season it will already be local in its new stadium. The wish of the fans of him is that this premiere is with his team in the National League.

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For this, the Greek, winner of nine titles (the last was in 2009), they need a win that will allow them to once again avoid the first relegation in their history (it is the only club that has played in all 39 editions of the league), with which they have already flirted for the past five years. This is the third time in the last five years that they have had to play in the playouts to stay in the league: in 2019 they beat Quilmes de Mar del Plata and in 2021 they beat Bahía Basket.

The mission will not be easy, given the cast he had the worst record in the regular stage (W5, L33) has won only one away game this season: it was on October 11, 2022, when the then team led by Claudio Arrigoni beat Unión 88-83 at the Ángel Malvicino stadium in Santa Fe. , even if nothing has changed an always irregular course.

Arrigoni was replaced by Sebastián González. He was replaced by Elián Villafañe. Since mid-February the helm has been in the hands of Álvaro Castiñeira. And the team has also undergone numerous changes and defections, to the point of arriving at this series with only five chips from older players, three fewer than those allowed by the regulation, due to the fact that the Puerto Rican Guillermo Díaz and the Americans Dominique Morrison and Javion Blake parted ways after the club ran out of four substitutions allowed.

With far fewer changes, too for San Lorenzo it was a stormy campaignvery different from what his fans had become accustomed to since his return to the top tier of Argentine basketball in 2015. five titles in line between 2016 and 2021 (the 2019/20 edition was canceled due to the covid-19 pandemic), led by Julio Lamas, Gonzalo García and Silvio Santander, and with elite teams, they do nothing but go into detail the pain of not being anymore that the fans live in these hours.

Bringing conflicts of leadership and with much less investment than in the golden years, the Cyclone He kept almost the entire squad with which he started the championship (only power forward Tomás Rossi left, replaced by Lautaro Mare), although he changed coach in February: Emmanuele Quintans left and one of his assistants, Leonardo Costa remained in charge. A meager record of 8-30 has deposited him in the playout bracket that settles tonight.

If Barcelona fans want to cling to numbers to reinforce their illusion of permanence, there are those who help them. The 10 wins his team had in the season were in Pando. And since this playout format was established in the 2015/16 season, the relegated team was the one with the worst record in the regular season.

That data seems a condemnation for Athens. However, supporters of Green They look into the latest playout series and find reasons to be hopeful. Last year, Unión started 2-0 down against Hispano Americano after losing their first few games in Santa Fe and ended up escaping relegation thanks to two wins in Río Gallegos and one at home. “Why can’t something like this happen?” ask the Cordobans.

They will have the answer around midnight, at the end of a match that will be played in a packed stadium: Pando’s 2,000 locations have been sold out since Monday. There will be 100 visiting fans in the San Lorenzo crowd who still harbor hopes that the former La Liga kingpin will not lose a place that has been theirs since 1985.