New Basketball Africa League host nation Morocco will present the Kalahari Conference from April 5, and will feature Nigeria’s Rivers Hoopers as well as home side FUS Rabat, while the tournament’s fifth edition will see six debutant teams.
The BAL named the conferences and teams for the 2025 season on Friday, with the Rabat leg, to be played at the Prince Moulay Abdellah Sports Complex, featuring a strong collection of teams. Joining Rabat and Hoopers will be Stade Malien from Mali and debutants Al Ittihad of Egypt.
In the season opener, Stade Malien will face Rivers Hoopers at 4:00 p.m. (GMT+1). In the second game, home team Fath Union Sport (FUS; Morocco) will take on Al Ittihad (Egypt) at 7:00 p.m. local time.
The other five debutants sides are teams from Cape Verde (Kriol Star Basketball) and Kenya (Nairobi City Thunder), as well as Senegal’s ASC Ville de Dakar, Al Ahly Tripoli of Libya, and Made By Basketball (MBB), from South Africa.
Meanwhile, defending champion Petro de Luanda (Angola) and 2022 champion US Monastir (Tunisia) will be playing in Dakar, Senegal, during the Sahara Conference from April 26 to May 5.
Petro de Luanda and US Monastir are the only teams to have qualified for all five BAL seasons. They are joined by hosts ASC Ville de Dakar and Kriol Star.
The Nile Conference, which will be played in Kigali, Rwanda, has three of the four sides making their debuts, so APR, the host side who have past BAL experience, will hope to use that to their advantage.
Each conference will play a 12-game group phase during which each team will face the other three teams in its conference twice.
During group phase play, the home team in each country will play on every gameday.
Eight teams from across the three conferences will travel to Pretoria, South Africa, for four seeding games followed by an eight-game, single-elimination playoffs and finals round, from Friday, June 6 – Saturday, June 14.