Season end recap: SEHA League

In the 2014/15 season SEHA League was the fourth tournament in which MKB-MVM Veszprém participated. In this tournament, the area’s best teams - 10 teams including Veszprém - gathered to play high-standard and enjoyable games, besides their own national championship matches. Veszprém took the chance and took part in the League founded in 2011 for the first time and ended up with a glorious triumph on home court.

 

 

SEHA League was eagerly awaited by the team as well as the fans. They faced the two Macedonian teams (Vardar, Metalurg), two Croatian teams (Zagreb, Nexe), two Serbian teams (Vojvodina, Radnicki), a Belarusian (Brest), a Slovakian (Presov), and a Bosnian (Borac).

 

Most of the opponents were new and unfamiliar for Coach Ortega and the players and the fans turned out to be really interested in the tournament since 4.415 people visited Veszprém Arena on average. The players of Veszprém were grateful for the fans for supporting them; moreover coaches and players of other teams also highlighted in the press conference that playing in front of such an audience was a great experience.

 

The team played its first stake game of 2014/15 season in this tournament against Vojvodina on August 27 and started SEHA League regular season as well as the whole season with a confident victory (19:32).

 

 

We can state that we faced several strong opponents during the Southeast European League and sometimes even smaller teams seemed to be hard to defeat. The long travels made our situation even harder and our schedule became busier when the Hungarian Championship began. In this respect, March turned out to be the hardest month since we played eleven games. Playing in SEHA League games proved to be a great opportunity for players to reveal their tactics against stronger teams with various methods. Final results sometimes did not reflect how difficult it was for “Építők” to play against certain opponent teams. Finally, we ended the regular season with a loss; in the last round we were unexpectedly defeated by Vardar (28:21), but despite that we won the regular season.

 

 

This was followed by the tournament at the end of March called the Final Tournament/Final4 SEHA Gazprom League, which included the best six teams of the regular season. Veszprém Arena was decided to be the venue of the event. As the winner of the regular season, MKB-MVM Veszprém - like the second team Vardar – joined the tournament only in the semi-final where they played an outstanding game against PPD Zagreb. The Croatian champion was able to close up but in the end Mikler’s amazing save (25:24) helped us get into the final and play in front of our fans.

 

In the final we played with Meshkov Brest which surprisingly defeated Vardar. The game seemed to be tight in the beginning but Veszprém’s great fast breaks gave the Belarusian team no chance. MKB-MVM Veszprém gained a glorious triumph (32:21) in its very first season in SEHA League, also obtained its first trophy in the season.

 

Chema Rodríguez was chosen as the best playmaker of the tournament and Roland Mikler, László Nagy as well as Gasper Marguc got into the All-Star team.

 

All in all, Veszprém has been given great feedback not only for its performance on the court but for the amazing job in organizing the SEHA League final which attracted many Hungarian and foreign fans and got much attention of the media.