CEBL beating long odds, growing roots among fans
Trying to get a new sports league to take flight in the middle of a pandemic should have been a death sentence.
But the plucky Canadian Elite Basketball League is alive and well and picking up speed. It has a TV deal with CBC, it just expanded to eight teams (with a ninth expected), and is playing to positive reviews.
It wraps up Year 3 with Championship Weekend — a cross between Grey Cup and the Final Four — with two semifinals on Friday (Niagara vs. Fraser Valley and Ottawa vs. Edmonton) and the championship game Sunday afternoon at the Edmonton Expo Centre.
“Things are going quite well,” said league commissioner Mike Morreale, in town for the fiveday event.
Like any startup business, the CEBL is still in a phase where initial investments outweigh returns, so planning and budgeting for that, instead of setting unrealistic expectations, helped them weather the last 18 months.
COVID -19 hit them hard, but they soldiered through a second season, playing an abbreviated quarantine bubble tournament in St. Catharines, Ont., that crowned Edmonton as champions. Now, in Year 3, they are welcoming fans back and trying to make up for lost time.
No new league will ever pretend that surviving three seasons means they've made it — the CFL has been around for 100 years and it still isn't out of the woods — but adding teams in Scarborough in the Greater Toronto
Area and Montreal, when the due diligence is complete, suggests things are moving right along.
“We ran into a lot of hesitation and a lot of, `Are you crazy?' kind of comments when we first started up this league because many have tried and failed,” said Morreale. “But our approach was to look at all those leagues and teams and do it differently. It started with governance and ownership and extended all the way to the rules we play by. We work hard. We're bringing a product to a ... population that has been underserved.”
For markets outside of Toronto, pro basketball didn't exist. Now there are homegrown options in Fraser Valley, B.C., Edmonton, Saskatchewan, Niagara, Guelph, Hamilton, Ottawa, Scarborough and Montreal. Each team has 70 per cent Canadian content, an easy target considering the untapped talent in this country, and the goal is 12 teams.
It's on a small scale right now — post-pandemic crowds are in the 1,000 to 1,500 range — but it's a good time for a good price and the business model is allowing it time to plant deeper roots.