There are thirteen teams in the 2019-20 VTB United League, with teams from Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Poland, Kazakhstan and Latvia competing through the course of the season.
CSKA Moscow have not made a vintage start to the latest campaign after suffering a couple of early defeats, although it hasn’t stopped the bookmakers from making the Russian champions the massive favourites to end up as champions.
Perhaps there will be some stubborn competition from a team like Khimki, with the team from the Moscow Oblast region having won all five of their opening encounters and they’re currently regarded as the team most likely to topple CSKA.
There’s little doubt that CSKA are the team to beat after last season’s impressive showing, with Dimitrios Itoudis’ side sitting top of the standings in the 2018-19 campaign before three facile victories in the play-offs to land the title.
The players will draw on that experience from last season when beating Khimki by a 3-0 scoreline and the latter will hope to push their rivals a good deal closer this time around.
Perhaps this will be a two-horse race this season and the bookies make it 14/1 the field beyond these two teams, with Lokomotiv Kuban trading at odds of 14/1 and they stumbled against Zenit St Petersburg at the quarter final stage of the competition last term.
As is the case with a lot of leading European basketball competitions, the leading eight teams will go through to the playoffs, with all the clubs meeting in a round robin format through the majority of the season before the final eight clash at the end of the campaign.
Last season, the top five teams in the regular standings were from Russia and this is largely regarded as a Russian championship despite the invitation being extended to teams from other countries.