Scotland men's national basketball team

The Scottish team's first European championship competition was at EuroBasket 1951 in Paris. They lost their eight games and finished 16th place out of 18. They outranked Luxembourg, who had had the misfortune of being in a five-team preliminary group instead of a four-team group (and losing all of their games), and Romania, who had dropped out of the tournament at the last minute.[2]

Six years later, at the EuroBasket 1957 in Sofia, Scotland competed much better. There, the squad won one of its three preliminary round games to be relegated to the classification round. The first match in that round pitted Scotland against Albania, who had also not yet achieved a victory in EuroBasket competition. The Scots proved the better, 69–56. Afterwards, they lost their next six matches but showed considerable improvement from the last tournament. They competed against Austria and West Germany the whole game until they finally ceded by one point and five points respectively to finish the classification round 1–6 in 15th place overall, ahead of Albania which they beat twice.[3]

Robert Archibald is Scotland's most well known basketball player. Because of his accomplishments he became an inspirational figure to basketball players throughout his home country.