Donar Groningen
On 20 September 1980, Donar Groningen beat BOB Oud-Beijerland 158 to 58. A hundred-point margin. Nobody in Dutch basketball had done it before and nobody has done it since. Even more impressively, Donar beat the same team again later that same season, 158 to 82 - the only repeat of that 158-point score in club history. There is something about Donar that defies the usual rules of Dutch sports, where football money flows to the Randstad and the north makes do. The country's most fervent basketball fans live here. The largest in-use basketball arena in the Netherlands is here. And the club, named for the Germanic god of thunder, has won the Dutch championship seven times.
Born From Gymnasts and Fencers
Donar's pedigree is older than basketball itself. The parent organization, GSSV Donar, was formed in 1881 when the gymnastics club Wodan and the fencing club Mars - both attached to the Groningen student corps Vindicat - merged. The name they picked was Donar, the old Germanic name for Thor, god of thunder. Basketball was an afterthought, added as a department only in 1951. Sixty years after the founding gymnasts and fencers shook hands, somebody had brought a ball with a ridiculous orange bounce. By 1970 the basketball department had promoted to the Dutch top division. In 1973 it broke away from Vindicat entirely, picked up insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden as a sponsor, and moved into the Martinihal - a real arena, not a student gym. Donar won its first Dutch championship in 1982. Then the sponsor walked away and the club, briefly, fell apart.
GasTerra and the Golden Years
Demoted to the rayon league after the sponsorship collapse, Donar won its way back. By 1986 they were in the top division again, where they have stayed ever since. The real boom came in 2009, when the Groningen natural-gas company GasTerra signed on as title sponsor and the club rebranded as the GasTerra Flames. The 2009-10 squad - Americans Matt Haryasz, Matt Bauscher, Jason Dourisseau, Robby Bostain alongside the Dutch roster - went 33 and 3 in the regular season and won the championship 4-1 over the West-Brabant Giants. The next year they qualified for the Euroleague qualifying rounds, the first Dutch team ever to do so. Dourisseau was named Dutch League MVP. The 2014 final against Den Bosch went seven games. Donar won 76-68 in Game 7 - their fourth championship.
The Braal Triple Crown
In 2015 the club brought in Erik Braal as head coach. He proved to be the most successful in Donar history. The 2016-17 season delivered the first triple crown ever recorded by the club: the Dutch Supercup, the NBB Cup, and the playoff title, all in a single season. The European story got better too. In 2017-18, after losing a qualifying overtime thriller to Spanish club Estudiantes, Donar dropped into the FIBA Europe Cup and ran the table - second in their group, first in the next, into the playoffs, knocking out U-BT Cluj-Napoca and Mornar Bar to reach the European semi-finals. They lost to Italian champions Reyer Venezia, but they won the second leg at home in front of a packed MartiniPlaza. That same season Brandyn Curry was named Dutch League MVP and Donar won the DBL title 4-0 over ZZ Leiden - a third consecutive championship. Five championships in eight years. Three trophies in 2016-17 alone.
Bankruptcy and Restart
On 29 June 2023, the Donar board called a press conference and revealed the club was 1.75 million euros in debt. A task force found that financial trouble had been festering for three years and that the board had not reported it. The supporters - the most passionate basketball fanbase in the Netherlands, 1,700 season-ticket holders who fill MartiniPlaza for playoffs - mobilized. A new entity, Donar Groningen BV, was created, and a supporter foundation called Wij zijn Donar - We Are Donar - raised money to buy shares. The trustee accepted their bid for the player contracts and the BNXT League license. On 28 August 2023, the license committee allowed the new entity to play in the BNXT League under conditions: no prior board member could remain, and the budget was capped at two-thirds of the old level. The club lived. Less than two months later, they were back on the floor at MartiniPlaza.
The Sixth Man
MartiniPlaza seats 4,350 and Donar regularly sells it out. In playoff games the noise is the kind that opposing teams talk about for years afterward. The arena has two stands named after club legends - the Jason Dourisseau stand since 2014, the Thomas Koenis stand since 2022. The supporters club, founded in 1997 and originally called the Vikings as a nod to the Norse god in the team name, eventually rebranded itself as SV Donar. In December 2024 the club fired coach Andrej Stimac mid-season and named Dourisseau, returning yet again, as interim head coach. The story keeps writing itself. A 19th-century gymnastics club that picked up basketball after the Second World War, won big in the 2010s, collapsed in 2023, came back in 2024 - and is still, by some measures, the loudest room in Dutch basketball.
From the Air
MartiniPlaza, Donar's home arena, sits at roughly 53.20 N, 6.56 E, just southwest of Groningen's historic centre. Groningen Airport Eelde (EHGG) is about 8 km south. From low altitude, the MartiniPlaza complex is recognizable as a large, modern indoor sports and events venue near the city's southern ring road, distinct from the medieval brick of the old town to the northeast. The Martinitoren - the church tower the arena takes its name from - rises above the city centre nearby.