On Thursday morning, the German Basketball Association published several pictures on Instagram.
You can see national players Maodo Lô, Johannes Thiemann, Niels Giffey and Franz Wagner at the airport.
"Good morning, Berlin" is written under the photos.
They have a deeper meaning: The Germans are not only in the city where they will fight for progress against Montenegro in the round of 16 of the European Championship this Saturday (6 p.m. on MagentaSport).
Christopher Meltzer
Sports correspondent in Munich.
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Michael Reinsch
Correspondent for sports in Berlin.
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They are also in the city where their sport has received a major boost.
Lô, Thiemann, Giffey and Wagner play or have played for Alba Berlin, the German champions of the past three years, the club that develops basketball in Germany with its ideas and its convictions season after season.
And with it the national team.
The Germans can be self-confident against Montenegro because they have what Alba Berlin also has: a team with depth, confidence in their own abilities and great, great fun in what they do. In the preliminary round in Cologne they were able to win against France and Lithuania.
These are teams with more talent.
National coach Gordon Herbert often uses ten out of twelve players in the first quarter.
It's not just the way the Germans play with each other, but the way they talk about each other that reminds of Alba.
Aunt Franziska comes into play
"It will be a very, very nice home field advantage," says Niels Giffey.
Born in Berlin and twice a college champion in the United States, he went abroad as a professional only last year at the age of thirty, after seven years as an Alba.
However, he wasn't happy at Zalgiris Kaunas, and he still hasn't got a contract for the new season.
He seems all the happier in Berlin.
"I noticed in my circle that there was a certain hype," he says.
With others it is not worth mentioning that the aunt is expected to the game, with him it is.
Franziska Giffey is the Governing Mayor of Berlin.
"I don't think she will go to Hertha on Saturday," says the nephew with a grin.
How much does what happened in Berlin affect the national team?
Center Johannes Thiemann, who has been with Alba for four years, says: “You carry the spirit in a bit.
You can tell that you are playing fluently because you understand each other very well.
You can tell that a lot of players come from this culture.
That shapes the game.”
Franz Wagner, born and raised in Prenzlauer Berg, is the rising star in the American NBA league.
“Who is the fourth Berliner?” Coach Herbert asked when asked about the Alba quartet in his team.
Wagner, who is just 21 years old and like his brother Moritz with the Orlando Magic for a year, was first used in the Bundesliga by Alba's Spanish coach Aito Reneses at the age of sixteen.
"The parallels that I can draw are that we have a lot of fun together, that everyone is happy for the other," says Wagner: "I had a similar experience with Alba."
"Sometimes looks like an Alba game"
Maodo Lô, who returned to Berlin because of a stroke of fate in the family, has developed into such a strong point guard in two years at Alba that Dennis Schröder predicts a career in America for him.
One seems to see in the extremely imaginative and almost dancing Lô that his mother, the painter Elvira Bach, gave him part of his talent.
"There is a certain chemistry," he says of the Alba connection in the team: "That's advantageous."
National coach Herbert looks with satisfaction at his “second unit”, as he calls his Berliners, three of whom always come from the bench.
If the three substitutes are also in the game together with youngster Wagner, there is often a blind understanding.
The pros know each other's strengths and preferences, how they want to be played, whether they will pass or throw.
"Sometimes it looks like an Alba game," says Himar Ojeda, Alba's sports director, "although the national team has more talent and is an independent team." He felt that in the opening game of the European Championship, when they defeated France the clearest.
"Everyone played without fear," he says, "bravely, full of self-confidence and with fun."
After Alba's training game, coaches, players and youth coaches stayed together in the training hall in Berlin-Mitte on Sunday and watched the broadcast of the game against Lithuania.
When Lô launched the attack, threw two threes in a row, when shortly afterwards Giffey also hit from the outside and under the basket, it got loud in the former school gym.
The enthusiastic coaches shouted that Lô should get the ball and show what he could do.
"We are proud of our players and of the entire German national team," says Ojeda: "It would be a dream if they played for the title here in Berlin."
On the first day in Berlin, the players of the national team were free.
Wagner and Giffey, Lô and Thiemann met on Schützenstrasse in Mitte: naturally in Alba's training hall.