Eight teams, one trophy. Who will win the 2022 BAL title?

It’s come down to eight teams to compete for the 2022 Basketball Africa League (BAL) title.

The race to this year’s BAL Finals began in October last year with the 18-team Road to the BAL, which visited Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg and Yaoundé.

It was followed by the Sahara Conference played in Dakar in March and the Nile Conference in Cairo in April.

Starting Saturday, May 21, Kigali Arena in the Rwandan capital will be the BAL Finals battle ground for the supremacy of top basketball clubs on the continent. It will conclude on Saturday, May 28.

Teams competing in the 2022 BAL Finals are AS Salé (Morocco), Cape Town Tigers (South Africa), Forces Armeés et Police (FAP) from Cameroon, Petro de Luanda (Angola), Rwanda Energy Group (Rwanda), Seydou Legacy Athlétique Club (SLAC) of Guinea, US Monastir (Tunisia) and Zamalek (Egypt).

This year’s BAL Finals get underway with two games on Saturday, before four other teams take to the magnificent Arena Kigali floor on Sunday to complete the Quarter-Finals series.

Petro de Luanda and AS Salé, two former African champions, will open the 2022 BAL Finals (14:00 local time) in what is expected to be a highly contested encounter.

Three and half hours later, host REG and FAP will throw their cards for a chance to reach the Semi-Finals.

Except for Cape Town Tigers, REG and SLAC, the other five teams have featured in the inaugural BAL last year in Kigali. 

The winners of the four Quarter-Finals advance to the Semi-Finals while the four losing teams will be eliminated.

The eight 2022 BAL Finals games will be broadcast across 215 countries and territories through free-to-air and paid TV broadcast partnerships with Canal+, ESPN, NBA TV, Tencent Sports, TSN, AFN, VOA, TV5Monde and VisionView TV and livestreaming on the NBA App, NBA.com and NBA.com/BAL.

And a comprehensive coverage will be available on the BAL social media platforms.

Fans will be allowed inside the Kigali Arena as long as they comply with the COVID-19 protocols.

And tickets can be purchased on the bal.nba.com website.

Cape Town, SLAC and REG are making their BAL debut.

Zamalek, the only team that has never tasted defeated in the history of the BAL (11-0), arrived in Kigali looking to protect their continental crown. 

Joining the list of African champions are AS Salé - winners of the 2017 FIBA Africa Champions Cup - and Petro de Luanda, who lifted the continental trophy in 2006 and 2015.

The 2022 BAL Finals is a display of some of Africa’s finest basketball talents with most teams counting with at least five national team players from their respective countries.

As part of the BAL Elevate program, each of the teams competing in this year’s BAL, count with one top prospect from the NBA Academy Africa.

After 30 regular season games, AS Salé’s Terrel Stoglin leads the BAL in scoring with 33.2 points per game.

US Monastir’s Ater Majok emerges as the most dominant player in the painted area with an average of 13.2 rebounds per game.

No other player protected the rim as ferociously as SLAC’s Chris Obekpa, who leads the league with 4.6 blocks per game.

Offensively, REG’s Adonis Filer has dished assists like no other, averaging a tournament-high of 9.2 dimes per game. 

Let the 2022 BAL Finals battle begin.