On Saturday 13 June 2026, in a Lotto Arena that had sold out in under 24 hours, the Antwerp Giants beat Oostende 89 to 84 after overtime in the fifth and last game of the final. It made them Belgian champions for the first time since 2000, and it ended a run that had become the fixed point of Belgian basketball: Oostende had won the title 14 years in a row, longer than Bayern Munich’s eleven straight Bundesliga titles from 2013 to 2023.

The game stayed close to the end. Antwerp led 28 to 22 after the first quarter and 65 to 55 after the third, then lost the fourth 12 to 22 as Pierre-Antoine Gillet and Marcus Domask hit two late threes each for Oostende. Regulation finished at 77 all. In overtime the Giants’ guard Rasheed Bello made the decisive steal, on Tytan Anderson, and closed it out from the free-throw line; he finished with 15 points, 6 rebounds and 7 assists and was named the most valuable player of the final. The Antwerp bench scored 42 of the team’s 89 points, and Kevin Tumba made three of four free throws in overtime.

Three trophies in one season

The title was the third prize of the 2025 to 2026 season. In March the Giants won the Belgian Cup after a close final against the Leuven Bears. On 2 May they beat Mons 116 to 76, scoring 39 points in the second quarter alone, to finish top of the BNXT League, the joint Belgian and Dutch competition, with 29 wins from 34 games. It was the first time the club had won it. The season before, the same club had finished sixth and gone out in the quarter-finals to Oostende.

The final itself went the distance. The Giants opened it by scoring 100 points against Oostende at home on 4 June; Oostende levelled the series in game two and went ahead in game three. On 11 June, in Oostende, Antwerp led for more than 38 minutes, nearly lost it, and won 70 to 69 on a late three-pointer by Enoch Cheeks. That forced the deciding game back in Antwerp two days later.

The coach is Roel Moors, back since 2025 for a second spell after leading the team from 2015 to 2019. In his first spell the Giants finished third in the Basketball Champions League in 2019, after losing the semi-final to Iberostar Tenerife. After game four he was blunt about how it had gone: “The game could certainly have ended differently, but I think our win was deserved.” His instruction to the players was shorter. “They can enjoy this for a moment, but not for too long.”

Ending Oostende’s run was good for Belgian basketball, not only for Antwerp: a league that one club wins 14 years running is a league whose ending everyone knows in advance. Before the Giants, the last champion other than Oostende had been Spirou Charleroi, in 2011. The city’s football club ended a longer wait three years earlier, when Royal Antwerp FC won its first Belgian league title since 1957.

A club from 1995, not 1921

The club is younger than the 2023 version of this page claimed. It was formed in 1995 from a merger of the Antwerp club Sobabee and Racing Mechelen, played as Racing Basket Antwerpen, and took the Giants name in the mid-2000s. Its names have followed its sponsors since: it won the 2000 title as Telindus Antwerpen and has played as Windrose Giants Antwerp since July 2024. Before this season it had won the Belgian Cup five times, in 2000, 2007, 2019, 2020 and 2023, and the Supercup in 2007 and 2016.

Several of the players who won the treble are Belgian. Vincent Kesteloot, a forward who had played for both Charleroi and Oostende, came back to the Giants in August 2025. Before the play-offs he refused to sound like a favourite: “We are ambitious, but the opposition cannot be underestimated.” The club kept most of that core for 2026 to 2027, including Niels De Ridder, Kesteloot and Tumba, and Cheeks, last season’s defensive player of the year.

The arena next door

Home is not the hall pictured above. That is the Sportpaleis, now called the AFAS Dome; the Giants play next door in the Lotto Arena on Schijnpoortweg, which opened on 10 March 2007 and is connected to it. The Lotto Arena holds 5,218 for basketball and up to 8,050 for concerts with a standing floor. It is not in the city centre, as the 2023 page said: it sits on tram line 12, which runs from Centraal Station to the Schijnpoort stop.

That makes one small club decision look sensible. The Giants’ season tickets for 2026 to 2027 include free De Lijn travel on matchdays, which suits an arena on a tram line better than a car park would.

Champions abroad

The BNXT League the Giants now lead has shrunk on the Dutch side. Its first edition had eleven Dutch teams; this season it has sixteen clubs, eleven Belgian and five Dutch, after Den Helder, Leeuwarden and Weert withdrew over the summer. In the Basketball Champions League the Giants won their first two group games, 99 to 93 at home against Szombathely of Hungary and 103 to 76 away at AEK Athens, the losing finalist of the previous season. They play Salon Vilpas in Finland on 3 November and AEK at home on 22 December.

Oostende, for the first time since 2011, has something to win back.