Ukraine’s professional sport has inevitably been disrupted by the Russian invasion and the ongoing war, especially in the east of the country. In cases like these, however, when the fighting on the field does not involve all areas, sport can become a sign of perseverance and unity: after the suspensions in the first months of the war, Ukraine has long since returned to playing both football than basketball, for example. The tournaments have been reduced and concentrated in the cities deemed safer, while the most important teams have also been able to play in the European cups by moving abroad from time to time.
In football, Shakhtar Donetsk and Dinamo Kiev played their home cup games in Poland, while in basketball there is a team that has decided to “split itself” effectively creating two teams in one, Budivelnyk Kiev. Its best players, especially foreign ones, moved to Italy last September to play the FIBA Europe Cup, while another part of the team remained in Ukraine to play the national championship.
The side of Budivelnyk who remained in Ukraine managed to win the championship, which ended last weekend. The tournament was played in a reduced format and in the absence of Prometey, the team from Kamianske – a city close to Dnipro, on the fighting front – which had won the last edition of the championship held before the invasion. This season, however, Prometey won a championship all the same.
Last summer he moved to Riga, Latvia, where his managers built a new team after losing old players to the aftermath of the war. It wasn’t particularly difficult for Prometey to start from scratch, because he had already done it a few years earlier. It was in fact founded in 2018 on the initiative of Volodymyr Dubynsky, a Ukrainian entrepreneur who named the team after his insurance group (Prometheus Insurance Company). Dubynsky also has interests in the real estate sector, and it is for certain activities of his in the United States that the FBI has been looking for him for eleven years with a arrest warrant for mortgage fraud in California.
However, this problem with American justice did not prevent him from continuing to do business in Ukraine, nor from founding a winning team made up of several US players. After being left without a city, where, moreover, it was building a new sports hall, Prometey decided to temporarily move to Latvia to participate in the Estonian-Latvian League, a supranational championship created in 2018 by the two Baltic countries to approach the level of the most competitive Lithuanian championship.
With a team built to compete at the European level, Prometey didn’t just win a foreign championship in which they were participating for the first time, but they swept it. He finished the season with 33 wins from 35 games played, with the best scoring average in the league (93.74), longest hitting streak (22), largest home wins (106-50) and away (115-58), and also with the seasonal audience record (5,050 spectators in the “derby” against the native team of Riga).
Prometey’s season did not end with winning the Estonian-Latvian League. He is in fact playing in the Eurocup playoffs, the second most important European tournament, in which he has already beaten both Reyer Venezia and Germani Brescia. Now it’s in the quarterfinals, where it will play against a Greek team almost its namesake, the Promitheas of Patras. If he were to win the tournament, which is difficult but not impossible, he would automatically qualify for the next edition of the Euroleague, the most important continental competition played by the big European teams.
His coach is the Israeli Ronen Ginzburg, who also coaches the Czech Republic. With his long experience in European basketball, Ginzburg personally contributed to the construction of the new team, divided equally between Ukrainian and foreign players, especially Americans with some experience in the NBA like David John Kennedy, for a season at the Cleveland Cavaliers and champion of Italy with Reyer Venezia in 2019.
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