What exactly is St. John’s getting into with the ABA?
New basketball league coming to Mile One has had a ‘chaotic’ history, with hundreds of franchise failures over two decades
Officially, it’s the American Basketball Association. In a general sense, it’s referred to as a hoops league. On closer inspection, the ABA, which could have a St. John’s-based team in its fold later this year, might be best described as a conglomeration of franchises of wildly varying makeup.
Numbers-wise, we’ll say it’s a conglomeration of dozens and dozens of franchises, although nailing down an exact number is difficult; the ABA’S official website shows more than 200 entries under the “Teams” tab. Mind you, half of these have no links to an associated site and many of those that do show links actually go nowhere or to dead ends or to sites that haven’t been active for a number of years.
These are among the many ABA franchises which have simply disappeared.
That sort of transiency has created what has to be the most amazing stat when it comes to the ABA: since 2000, when the present league was formed, more than 550 ABA franchises have come and gone.
No, that’s not a case of one too many “fives “or a “zero” that snuck in at the end of “55”. That’s more than five hundred and fifty no-longer-in-existence ABA franchises.
That includes a few which transferred to other leagues, but the vast majority simply became defunct.
In a 2015 Sports Illustrated story, writer Alexander Wolff described the ABA as “a weed of growth, death and regeneration,” and he wasn’t just commenting as a journalist. Wolff had actually owned an ABA team, buying an expansion franchise for $5,000 and setting it up in his home state as the Vermont Frost Heaves, following another ABA pattern — outlandish team nicknames. The “Heaves” won back-to-back ABA titles in their first two seasons, but eventually jumped to another league and folded after five years.
The seed for Wolff’s ABA involvement started with his pitch of a first-person story to his SI bosses, but he admits there was some lure in being the owner of a professional team, and this is undoubtedly has been a contributor to the franchise “regeneration” to which he referred. Another factor is the seemingly inexhaustible supply of willing talent. As Jeff Dunlap, the first head coach of the National Basketball League of Canada’s St. John’s Edge — which would be replaced by the proposed ABA team — once pointed out, there are far more basketball players than basketball jobs.
In fact, while the ABA is said to have a salary cap and some players earn hundreds of dollars per game, there are others who aren’t paid at all. Many have full-time jobs away from the basketball court, which has led to a tendency for ABA teams to schedule weekend games to aid players in maintaining their Monday to Friday 9-to-5 employment. It’s one of a variety of reasons — the fact many ABA teams play out of high school gyms is another — why several ABA observers insist on referring to it as a semi-pro league.
Of course, that is not how the ABA markets itself. It makes a great deal about being an extension of the original American Basketball Association that operated for a decade until 1976, when it merged with the NBA. But the truth is the only connection between the two is (1.) that one of the co-founders of the new-version league was involved in establishing the original ABA, and (2.) the use by both of a distinctive red, white and blue basketball. Nevertheless, this hasn’t prevented the current ABA’S website from featuring a Julius Irving-covered video of the history of the inaugural ABA or from having celebrated 2017 as the ABA’S 50th anniversary.
The ABA also promotes the ease of franchise ownership.
“There are many great markets available throughout the world and it is easier to own and operate an ABA team than any other league.” it states in a section that allows anyone to begin the process of “reserving” an ABA market simply by providing an e-mail address, along with a message.
The ease of application and low franchise fees has led to teams from Hawaii to Maine and Alaska to Florida. But the low initial investment has also been tied to what has been a chronic problem with underfunded teams, meaning some ABA markets are being constantly recycled — there have been nearly 20 different ABA teams in the Chicago metro area alone.
It is the sort of instability that led the New York Times to once describe the ABA as “chaotic.”
But despite the chaos — whatever its scope — the league has survived and is now expanding to Canada.
It has been here before, with teams in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Quebec and Halifax among the hundreds that have come and gone in the ABA. There was also an ABA team in Grande Prairie, Alta. — sort of. The team was called the Grande Prairie Cowboy, but it turned out the Cowboys played out of Livonia, Mich., as an “atlarge” team — no games were played in Grande Prairie, no player ever set foot in the town.
It would seem the plan for the ABA to return to Canada could involve more than St. John’s.
In February — in one of the most recent posts on its Twitter account — the ABA announced it was establishing ABA Canada, headed up by Xavier Mitchell, the CEO of Valiant Eagle, a new publiclytraded company based in southern California said to be working on \“feeding highquality, fulfilling program content to iphones, Android phones, tablets, computers, and smart TVS.”
Aba-canada said it would focus on putting franchises in the Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver regions. There was never any mention of St. John’s, and this week, it became clear why that was.
In a statement welcoming St. John’s to the league, ABA chief executive officer Joe Newman said “While we are developing ABA Canada, this team will actually be competing with the US ABA teams.”
The yet-to-be-named team is owned by 2001 Investments Limited, led by president Tony Kenny and also involving John Fisher and William Kennedy, a trio that has remained persistent in a quest for a St. John’s area-sports presence, after having been shut out in previous attempts to own minor-pro and majorjunior hockey and pro basketball franchises to play out of Mile One Centre.
How a schedule against American teams and the presumed recruitment of American players would work when cross-border travel between the United States and Canada is still in question isn’t clear. There will also be questions about travel costs, including the responsibility of travel costs for visiting teams, especially in a league with so many franchises operating on barebones budgets.
Also to be answered is whether St. John’s will be among the teams that get to compete for the ABA championship.
That might seem odd, but the league’s website explains there are two conferences — one that involves teams that might be called title contenders and another, much larger group of teams that aren’t involved in the playoffs; the best they can apparently gain are participants’ medals.
“The BLUE conference is made up of teams that play 20 or more games during the regular season,” says the league site. “Being in the BLUE conference, a team is allowed to compete in the playoffs and championship. The RED conference is made up of teams that play 19 games or less during the regular season. The RED conference allows the teams to grow at their pace and one day move to up to the BLUE conference to compete in the playoffs and championships.”
You won’t find the Red and Blue conferences in the league standings because there are no actual 2020-21 standings, just what is called “power rankings” of 25 playoff contenders.
The ABA’S new regularseason schedule is supposed to start in early November and extend into early spring of 2022.