The 1968–69

FIBA European Cup Winners' Cup The FIBA Saporta Cup, founded as ''FIBA European Cup Winners Cup'', was the name of the European professional club basketball system, second-tier level European-wide professional club basketball competition, where the domestic National Cup winn ...

was the third edition of

FIBA The International Basketball Federation (FIBA ; French language, French: ) is an association of national organizations which governs the sport of basketball worldwide. FIBA defines the rules of basketball, specifies the Basketball equipment ...

's 2nd-tier level European-wide professional club

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appro ...

competition, contested between national domestic cup champions, running from December 1968, to 17 April 1969. 22 teams took part in the competition. The final, held in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

, featured for the first time, two clubs from the

Eastern Bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, the Workers Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were a ...

. Slavia VŠ Praha, which had lost the previous edition's final to AEK, defeated

Dinamo Tbilisi Dinamo Tbilisi is a sports club from Tbilisi, Georgia (country), Georgia. It was founded in 1925. Among its highest honors, is the European trophy earned by its Association football, football team which won the Cup Winners' Cup in 1981, beating ...

, to become the competition's first Czechoslovak League champion.Autoskoda wins the Cup Winners' Cup

El Mundo Deportivo ''Mundo Deportivo'' (; ) is a Spanish nationwide daily sports newspaper published in Barcelona. History and profile ''Mundo Deportivo'' was first published on 1 February 1906, as a weekly newspaper, and since 1929 daily. It is the oldest sports ...

, 18 April 1969

Participants

First round

Second round

;Automatically qualified to the quarter-finals: *

Quarterfinals

*Originally, Fides Napoli won the first leg by 37 points (98–61), but in the return game in Athens the Italian club withdrew during halftime ( Panathinaikos winning then 51–16) as a protest for what they considered a biased refereeing and many irregularities in the scoring procedure (in particular, Fides claimed that the real halftime score should have been 39–28 for Panathinaikos, and also that the first half lasted more than the regulated 20 minutes). However the French FIBA Commissar Edmond Pigeu nor the Secretary General William Jones (who was also present in the outdoor Panathinian Stadium, with more than 25,000 fans crowding the stands) saw anything irregular in this game. Later, FIBA expelled Fides Napoli from the competition and declared Panathinaikos winner by forfeit (2–0).

Semifinals

Final

April 17, Wiener Stadthalle,

References

External links

*
FIBA European Cup Winner's Cup 1968–69
{{DEFAULTSORT:1968-69 FIBA European Cup Winners' Cup

Cup A cup is an open-top vessel (container) used to hold liquids for drinking, typically with a flattened hemispherical shape, and often with a capacity of about . Cups may be made of pottery (including porcelain), glass, metal, wood, stone, pol ...

FIBA Saporta Cup