The Eredivisie - the Honour Division - was founded in 1960 for basketball, the same name the country's football league still uses today. It was a closed competition: to play, your club needed both a roster and enough money to keep the lights on, and the league reserved the right to say no. For most of its life the Dutch top flight ran between eight and twelve teams. Playoffs arrived in 1977, the name became the Dutch Basketball League in 2010, and the rules kept evolving to protect Dutch passport-holders from being squeezed out by imports. From 2019 the requirement was at least six home-grown players per roster - a quiet acknowledgment that the league was, first and foremost, a place for Dutch basketball players to play.

Donar is short for Donar Groningen, the basketball club of a northern university city famous mostly for its weather. In the second half of the 2010s, Donar dominated. They won four DBL titles between 2014 and 2018 - in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018 - including three straight from 2016 through 2018. ZZ Leiden was the other big force - three titles, including the last DBL championship in 2021 - and Heroes Den Bosch picked up two. The Big Three of Dutch basketball were not glamorous clubs, and the league did not pretend they were. Crowds of two or three thousand were typical for a regular-season game. But the rivalries were real, and Donar's run created the kind of in-league dynasty that even a small league can be proud of.

In the 2017-18 FIBA Europe Cup - the third tier of European club basketball, but still genuinely European - Donar won their group, beat Estonian and German opponents in the knockouts, and made the final four. They lost the semi against Italian side Umana Reyer Venezia. It was the first time a Dutch club had reached that stage in seventeen years. The Groningen home arena, MartiniPlaza, was sold out for the playoff games. For a few weeks, a small basketball club in a small basketball country was something Europe paid attention to. The DBL's all-time leading scorer is Kees Akerboom Sr., a player from an earlier era whose name still sits at the top of the league record book - a record set in a league that quietly produced moments like Donar's, every once in a while, against the odds.

The same period that gave the league Donar's European run also gave it a steady stream of bankruptcies. ABC Amsterdam folded in 2011. The West-Brabant Giants folded in 2011. Matrixx Magixx ran out of money in 2014. New clubs filtered in - Apollo Amsterdam, Den Helder Suns, the Dutch Windmills (who lasted exactly one season) - but the math was always tight. When the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the 2019-20 season in March 2020, it was the first time in league history that no Dutch champion was crowned. Entry requirements for the following season had to be loosened just to find enough clubs to play. The Hague Royals, Almere Sailors, and Basketball Community Gelderland all joined under the relaxed rules.

In December 2019 the league announced talks with the Belgian Pro Basketball League about a combined competition - a BeNe League. By 2021 it was real. The Dutch Basketball League played its final season in 2020-21, ZZ Leiden took the last title, and the league dissolved. In its place came the BNXT League, a Belgian-Dutch competition with two national phases and a cross-border knockout, designed to give clubs in both countries more games, more rivalries, and more reasons for fans to show up. The Dutch Basketball League had run for sixty-one years. It never produced a Euroleague champion or a NBA superstar. What it did produce was Donar's spring of 2018, a couple thousand fans in MartiniPlaza, and the steady, unglamorous work of keeping basketball alive in a country that prefers football.