ABA League
1st-tier regional men's professional basketball league
The ABA League, renamed the ABA League First Division in 2017, is the top-tier regional men's professional basketball league that originally featured clubs from former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia). Due to sponsorship reasons, the league was also known as the Goodyear League from 2001 to 2006, the NLB League from 2006 to 2011, and as the AdmiralBet ABA League from 2021.
The league coexists alongside scaled-down national leagues in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. All but one of Adriatic League clubs join their country's own competitions in late spring after the Adriatic League regular season and post-season have been completed. In the past, the league has also consisted of clubs from Bulgaria (Levski), the Czech Republic (ČEZ Nymburk), Hungary (Szolnoki Olaj), and Israel (Maccabi Tel Aviv) that received wild card invitations. For the 2024–25 season Dubai Basketball from the United Arab Emirates is also joining the league. In the following 2025–26 season, it was expanded to 18 teams with the participating other European countries in Romania (U-BT Cluj-Napoca) and Austria (BC Vienna) and two nine team groups.
The Adriatic League is a private venture, founded in 2001 and run until 2015 by the Sidro, a Slovenian limited liability company. Since 2015, the league has been operated by ABA League JTD, a Zagreb-based general partnership for organizing sports competitions. Adriatic Basketball Association is the body that organizes the league and is a full member of ULEB, as well as a voting member of Euroleague Basketball's board.
The public source identifies “ABA League” as 1st-tier regional men's professional basketball league. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around League, 1st-tier and regional.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q257400. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2001, 2006 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “ABA League” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.