Bakken Bears – Horsens

Danish Basketligaen Round 2

Aarhus, September 19, 18:30 CET

In the duel between the most successful clubs in the modern era of the Danish Basketligaen, the Bakken Bears will be absolute favorites on Tuesday against Horsens.

The champions from Aarhus, the biggest Danish club Bakken Bears, have won as many as 11 titles since 2011. Only Horsens has managed to break the Bears' dominance twice since then. However, in the last few years, the Aarhus club has been unassailable and it is expected to be the same in the new season. The team of coach Anders Sommer (leads the Bears since 2020) is in an excellent position to win the eighth Danish championship title in a row in the spring of next year.

The Bears have a respectable squad and for fighting in European competitions, American forwards Pinckney and Evans are ideal options for a physically dominant and fast game. In reality, all Danish rivals (as well as Horsens) have some solutions for the dominant Senegalese center Diouf. Shooting guard Jukic is a dominant point guard, but also a reliable option when it comes to assists and rebounds. Most importantly - the core of the Bears team has been preserved, the main players have a routine of playing together for a long time, and it is no wonder that this team is offensively dominant in Denmark in almost every game.

The results from the beginning of September are the best evidence of how the Bears will play this season. Last weekend they routinely won against Copenhagen 93:80 at the start of the new Basketligaen season. Previously, on September 9, they lost against the excellent German Bundesliga team Ludwigsburg (86:85). In a duel with the Dutch team Den Bosch, the Bears lost 96:90 in a match played on September 2. Essentially, both rivals in team friendly games are of better quality than the competitors against whom Aarhus team competes in the Danish championship.

In the last nine games (that is, in all games played since the beginning of May), only once have the Bakken Bears scored fewer than 83 points. At home in Aarhus, this team in Basketligaen has won 17 in a row (since November 2022)! In the last 20 games that the Bears played as hosts in the domestic league, they scored at least 82 points in each one, and only twice less than 86 points...

All this testifies to the fact that the champion will play dominantly in attack against Horsens. What is important is that in the rhythm of the fast game, the guests against the Bears usually get a chance to score a decent number of points. In their last match, at the beginning of May, Bears won against Horsens 100:94.

Horsens away from home, interestingly, have as many as seven defeats in a row - so the handicap for the Bears victory at the bookmakers is set excessively high. In the last ten away games, the Horsens team received at least 80 points each time (and six times they scored at least 77 points).

It is expected that the Bears will decide the winner in the early stages of the duel, and that until the end the game will be played in the attacking rhythm without many fouls or rough play, by the rivals who have objectively demonstrate the best basketball in Denmark for many years.