The parent organisation was founded in 1992, when two small Leeuwarden clubs called Sporty and Ymir merged into BV Aris. The professional side took the name of a famously underdog Cypriot team, Aris Limassol, who reputedly had about three hundred fans. In 2004 the senior team won promotion from the Promotiedivisie, the Dutch second tier, into the top-flight Eredivisie. Tom Simpson was the coach. For sponsorship reasons the team was called Woon!Aris that year, and somehow it made the playoffs in its first season. Then came four years of mediocrity. In 2009-10 the renamed De Friesland Aris made the playoff semi-finals for the first time. The club had found a level: better than relegation, never quite a champion, always financially precarious.

Going into 2012-13 the club was in trouble. Main sponsor Lasaulec had pulled out, the budget was thin, and almost nobody picked Aris to do anything. The squad had two recognised stars, the American guards Whit Holcomb-Faye and Samme Givens, and around them a roster paid in hope. They beat the top-seeded Den Bosch three games to one in the semi-finals. In the championship series they ran into ZZ Leiden, who had finished second in the regular season, and lost in a clean sweep, four games to none. It was a famous run that did not finish, and it was the closest the club ever came to a national title. The next summer they signed insurance company Unive as their new main sponsor, expanded the Kalverdijkje arena's capacity from 800 to 1,700, and tried to consolidate.

Under coach Ferried Naciri in 2019-20 the team reached the Dutch Cup final, the first time in its history. The opponent would have been Donar of Groningen, the dominant Dutch club of the era, in what should have been one of the great underdog occasions in northern Dutch sport. Then the pandemic closed everything. The basketball federation tried to find a date. Donar, deep in its own scheduling problems, could not agree. The trophy went unawarded. The 2021-22 season started in a new competition called the BNXT League, which merged the top tiers of the Netherlands and Belgium into a single playoff structure. Aris reached the semi-finals again in 2022-23, the third time in its history. It was the last good thing that happened to the old club.

When the 2022-23 season ended the financial picture went from bad to fatal. The BNXT league organisation refused the club's licence application. Rather than fold entirely, the three board members dissolved the old stichting, the non-profit foundation that had carried the team through three decades, and set up a besloten vennootschap, a private limited company, to take its place. The phoenix club, as the football world calls them, was reborn in the same arena with most of the same staff but a deliberately different identity. The new name LWD Basket uses the IATA airport code for Leeuwarden, a small piece of civic shorthand the city's residents recognised immediately. The new colours, blue and yellow, are the city flag's. The Kalverdijkje still seats 1,700 and the team still plays in the BNXT League, smaller than Donar of Groningen and shaped by the same financial physics that has finished many other small-city European basketball clubs. So far it has not finished this one.