• ACB. A tournament with 12 teams in a unique venue
  • Students. "Debt kills us. It is unbearable."

Like a trapeze artist who recreates his luck, in the most difficult yet. There was always a network for the Students, accustomed to a last time of pure agony, sporting and institutional, balancing on the tightrope of survival. Colista and without too many symptoms of resurrection (a victory in the last nine games) , everything seemed doomed to the abyss, to the decline that only the firms avoided in 2012 and 2016. But luck should not be underestimated: the resolution on Monday of the ACB Assembly ruled that no one will lose the category.

Movistar Students will not miss his appointment next year, as he never did in the highest category of national basketball, the only one with Real Madrid and Joventut who can boast of that. Like an Olympic routine, every four years it spends one life. It happened in 2012 and 2016 (in 2008 he had been saved athletically, with a win in extremis on the last day in León), recovering in the offices what he had lost on the field, in those lead years where the ACB was a closed preserve for a canon that was a wall. This time the break came to the rescue due to the coronavirus pandemic, which can always be done with an 'insane' flaw in the script.

It did not seem fair to send the LEB Oro to the last two, to Estudiantes and Montakit Fuenlabrada (five wins in 23 games, one game less than Paco García), with 11 dates still to play, although the advantage and vital signs of Murcia and Betis, with whom they fought to avoid the fall, seemed healthier. So the telematic Assembly, among the important decisions made on Monday - an unprecedented tournament with 12 teams in a single venue - decided to leave the ACB as it was, at the expense of two promotions from LEB, with the next course 20 teams would compose it and there would be four descents.

As if the "Let's not go down!" with which the tribunes of the Palace thunder when the Estu is in trouble became a magical spell, the schoolboys have once again achieved permanence on a stage that resembles what happened in the past. The first great suffocation of the entity that celebrates 73 years of history occurred in 2012, that gray afternoon in May in which, after falling home with UCAM Murcia, they certified the first decline in its history, in the match in which Carlos Jiménez was saying goodbye to basketball. Less than 40 days later, the Iberostar Canarias, champion of the LEB Gold, announced that it could not assume the promotion fee, then prohibitive (seven million euros between the entry fee, the fund for the regulation of ascents and descents, the fee of participation and the guarantee guarantee, to which the budget had to be added, around 1.5 million).

The same happened in 2016, after another catastrophic season in sports, finished off with a defeat in Guipúzcoa against a team that was already relegated. This time neither Cerrato Palencia Cheese nor Melilla could meet the requirements.

It is true that this time the Estu had not given up. With Javier Zamora as the new coach and the signings of Edwin Jackson, Byron Mullens and Melo Trimble, he intended to continue believing. Because the decline, together with its economic problems - in full and urgent capital increase - would have been a definitive blow for those of the Ramiro de Maeztu.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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