Provincial is the best team in the entire Argentine Basketball Leaguethe second category at the national level. With a record of 13 wins and 3 lossesthe Parque Independencia team surprises the country with its numbers and performance.
He closed 2025 with eight wins in a rowbut 2026 arrived and, after the holidays, lost to Racing de Avellaneda in Rosario. However, he recovered two days later. He beat Quilmes in Mar del Plataa team that was undefeated at home. This Friday, A great game against Rocamora triumphed again in Rosario of Concepción del Uruguay and extended its good moment. This Sunday he plays again at the Salvador Bonilla stadium against Deportivo Viedma.
The team he leads Esteban Gatti He dreams big and so does his coach: “We suffered a defeat at the start of the year that ended our good streak, but nothing is eternal. We also didn’t really expect to win eight games in a row. Obviously, we work to achieve it, but that It happens game by game without you realizing it. We measured up in every game. It could happen that we lost at home, but then we went away and recovered. “We won again on a very demanding field.”
The defeat against Racing did not seem to change the course: “Luckily we had a quick game, we had lost on Friday and on Sunday we left for Mar del Plata. We didn’t even have time to think about it. The team showed the face it had shown during November and December of last year and that left me calm.
The Provincial boys finished playing around Christmas and on January 2 they were back ready for action: “We had 10 days of vacation, but we are used to it. Basketball is like that. There is little time to unplug, see the family – those of us who are far away – and then go back to work,” Gatti added.
In basketball, unlike football, logic is usually the norm, so the result is almost always a child of performance: “We found ourselves game by game with a solid game and achieving victories. We worked a lot in the October preseason, obviously there is a lot of tournament ahead. Y I don’t think we have reached the ceiling, we can continue playing better.”
“The Argentine League is very long, We are 17 teams per conference, round tripwith five months of regular phase. We, with last Friday, we will have five games in eleven days. You have to have a long team and be able to rotate: The teacher and the kinesiologists are doing a great job. for the recovery of the boys.
They even work in the bus (Provincial).
“There is a lot left, the playoffs are something else. We still have room for improvement. In any case, we have the name of candidates because we are there, but there are teams with a bigger budget and longer ones.”
Gatti arrived along with five reinforcements in mid-2025 to play in the Argentine League. The project challenged itself after the promotion in the Federal Tournament: “This year, Provin wanted to bet a little more than he had been betting, he looked for players with a bigger budget,” he said..
In the same sense, he spoke about the surnames that are behind the idea: “Pablo Fernández, with Marcelo Bloch and President Sebastián Franco They are very involved in basketball and we are very happy with the club. What was created from within comes from them.”
And he added: “To fight tournaments you have to put together good teams. When Provin put together the Federal Tournament team and brought in good players, they were promoted. There is not much secret to that. The budget is the thermometer to know if you fight above, in the middle or below. “The project was put together more pretentious than before.”
Finally, it gave true dimension to Argentine basketball in terms of comparing it with others, in times where criticism is very deep: “As a League, Argentina is the best. We must remove the United States. To Puerto Rico too. They are leagues with a lot of money, with which you cannot compete. They play for 3 months and players can get paid 80 to 100 thousand dollars per month. It is unattainable. But if we talk about long leagues, Argentina is the best. Of course, you have places with a more important infrastructure, like in Mexico. But they are not clubs, they are franchises. They don’t have inferiors or anything like that.
