A series of defeats will come to an end when the BG Göttingen competes in the basketball Bundesliga on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the newly promoted MLP Academics Heidelberg. The newcomer, who had a surprisingly strong start to this season and who had even topped the table once, slipped to eleventh place after three narrow defeats in a row. The BG Göttingen was also the front runner, before two more clearly lost games against Hamburg (46:83) and FC Bayern Munich (66:80) threw the Veilchen back to ninth place. In addition, the two rotation players Zack Bryant and James Dickey left during the international break.
Heidelberg and Göttingen have never met since digital data was recorded in the Bundesliga for the 1998/99 season. Both locations are steeped in history as basketball strongholds. In the 1980s, three German championship titles went to the ASC in Göttingen, and two to Heidelberg in the 1970s. Both cities have both a men’s and a women’s Bundesliga team. Here, too, parallels can be seen: While the men’s teams each had a good start to the season, both the Medical Instinct Veilchen BG 74 from Göttingen and the SNP BasCats USC Heidelberg are in the middle of the fight to stay in class.
In the game on Saturday, the two teams with the fewest assists in the league will meet: Göttingen has so far had 14.1, Heidelberg 13.0 assists per game. The defensive strength of the South Germans can be read from the admitted points per game, only 73.6 points are left on average by the Heidelberg team to their opponents.
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Ignjatovic relies on six top performers who spend an average of 25 to 34 minutes on the floor. US guard Shy Ely (around 34 minutes) will receive most of the playing time, followed by US guard Jordan Geist (32) and US forward Brekkott Chapman (29). The German guard Niklas Würzner plays an average of around 28 minutes; US builder Rob Lowery and US forward Kelvin Martin (both 26) complete the sextet. Of these six players, five score an average of double digits per game: Geist, Ely (13.9 each), Lowery (13.6), Chapman (11.4) and Martin (10.5). Lowery and Ely are also very accurate from beyond the three-point line.
