How Isiah Thomas murdered the Continental Basketball Association

In February 2001, the Continental Basketball Association – a 50+ year old minor league basketball circuit that acted both as a feeder system to the NBA and as a professional outlet for players looking for that one chance for the big time – folded in mid-season. The blame for the CBA’s death – although a resurrected version of the CBA continued until 2009 – has been laid on the hubris-shod feet of Isiah Thomas. He deserves blame for it, but not all the blame.

Background.

The CBA began life in 1946 as the Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball League, a 6-team Keystone State pro outlet. The league found solid homes in Scranton, in Wilkes-Barre, in Sudbury – and eventually it would expand to surrounding states over time. John Chaney played in the EPBL, as did Hubie Brown and Jack Ramsay. In the 1960’s, it was a stop for Bob “Butterbean” Love and Paul Arizin; by the 1970’s, when the league branded itself as the EBA (Eastern Basketball Association), Jim Boeheim was on the roster for the Scranton Apollos.

By 1977, the EBA expanded from its Northeastern footprint all the way out to Alaska – Anchorage, to be more precise. The Anchorage Northern Knights helped the league build fans on the West Coast, and after some aborted stops in Hawaii, Montana and Albuquerque, the league – now known as the Continental Basketball Association – flourished.

And with the success of the CBA came a special prize for top players – the 10-day contract. Any NBA team could claim a CBA player for a ten day stint in the big leagues; if a CBA player survived two consecutive ten-day contracts, the NBA team would have to sign him for the rest of the year or send him back to the CBA. Which meant that CBA stars like Tim Legler, Mario Elie, Vincent Askew, Bruce Bowen, Scott Brooks, Rick Carlisle and Tony Campbell could get their chance to shine in the NBA.

The CBA also was a pipeline for future NBA coaches – Phil Jackson, Bill Musselman and George Karl all coached for the Albany Patroons, while future NBA coach Flip Saunders guided the LaCrosse Catbirds to two CBA titles. In fact, by 1993 the CBA had expanded to seventeen teams from coast to coast.

But the 10-day contract was a loose agreement, and in 1996, Isiah Thomas – then employed as the Director of Operations for the Toronto Raptors – commented that the CBA should expand so that each NBA team would have one CBA club under its tutelage, in an arrangement similar to both professional baseball and pro hockey. It would make sense, for example, for future Chicago Bulls to learn the pro game as members of the Rockford Lightning; or the LaCrosse Bobcats sending their top stars to Milwaukee.

But in 1996, the CBA was no longer a 17-team coast-to-coast pro basketball league. Overexpansion and poor marketing forced the CBA to downsize, at one point operating with as few as nine teams. The CBA still received a yearly grant from the NBA to be the NBA’s “official developmental league,” and referees were trained in CBA games for future NBA usage.

Still, by 1999, the CBA was 54 years old, and showed no signs of slowing down. By that time, Isiah Thomas was out of the Raptors organization, and was employed as an NBA analyst for NBC. Thomas initially looked into the possibility of joining an ownership group for a CBA franchise in Gary, Indiana – but eventually came up with another idea.

That idea was to purchase the entire Continental Basketball Association, including all the teams, and the marketing company CBA Properties, and operate the league as a single-owner entity. On August 3, 1999, Thomas bought the league for $10 million, and announced that the league will now operate as a single-owner entity, and that the CBA will continue to be the official developmental league of the NBA.

Isiah Thomas on the cover of the 1999-2000 CBA Preseason Guide and Register.

Thomas announced there would be some rule changes and modifications to the CBA under his ownership – players would wear “business casual” clothing – collared shirts and slacks – when traveling with the team. Double-teaming a player would be illegal except in the final five minutes of regulation. Thomas even abandoned the CBA’s quarter-point playoff scoring system (teams received three standings points for a victory, and one standings point for each quarter in which they outscored their opponent), in favor of the more traditional “teams with the most wins make the playoffs” format.

On October 7, 1999, the sale of the CBA to Isiah Thomas was finalized. Thomas paid $5 million up front for the league, and agreed to make four payment installments to the CBA’s former team owners for the balance of the debt.

Thomas envisioned the league as a feeder system to the NBA, but he wanted his teams stocked with more rookies and younger players. So on October 24, 1999, Thomas announced salary cuts in the CBA. The average salary of $1,500 per week shrank to $1,100 per week; with rookies getting $800 a week. By reducing the number of veterans in the league, Thomas believed there would be more young talent available for NBA teams.

By March 2000, Isiah Thomas contacted the NBA to see if the league was interested in purchasing the CBA. The NBA offered Thomas $11 million and a percentage of the profits for the CBA – a $2 million profit from Thomas’ initial purchase. “The NBA made an offer that wasn’t what Isiah expected,” said Brendan Suhr, a former coach and co-owner of the CBA’s Grand Rapids Hoops, “so he decided not to sell the league at that time.”

On June 28, 2000, Isiah Thomas received his own offer – to coach the NBA’s Indiana Pacers. A coach in one league owning a team in another league was a conflict of interest – and a coach owning an entire league was even more of a conflict (for example, Thomas could mine the CBA for the best talent for the Pacers, or try to block any call-ups that would benefit other NBA teams that might face the Pacers in the postseason). The NBA gave Thomas a choice – sell the CBA and accept the Pacers’ coaching position, or forget the Pacers altogether and run the CBA. Thomas at first tried to sell the CBA to the NBA Players’ Union, who passed on the offer.

Then came an added blow to the CBA. In the summer of 2000, after more than twenty years of using the CBA as its developmental league, the NBA announced it would form its own minor league feeder system, creating the National Basketball Development League (today known as the NBA Developmental League, quickly nicknamed the “D-League,” now known as the Gatorade League or “G-League”). Because of this, the NBA’s 20-year “official developmental league” relationship with the CBA Would end after the 2001 season.

On October 2, 2000, Isiah Thomas, unable to sell his ownership in the CBA, placed the league into a blind trust, and accepted the Pacers head coaching position. With the league in a blind trust, suddenly there was no money to pay for travel, food, salaries, incidentals – anything. Franchises were borrowing from the few teams that had money – a running joke at this point was that teams were borrowing from the “First National Bank of Sioux Falls,” otherwise known as the SkyForce, just to make payroll or handle day-to-day operations.

February 8, 2001 is a date that will live in infamy. For on this day, the Continental Basketball Association suspended operations. The blind trust that was to find a new owner for the league gave up. The league incurred over $2 million in debts. Teams are offered back to their original owners. Several of the owners refuse to take them back, not wishing to pay for debts that were incurred during the Isiah Thomas ownership period. This meant that franchises like the Quad City Thunder and Fort Wayne Fury simply disappeared from the basketball landscape.

“”My love of the game drove my decision to purchase the CBA,” Thomas told the Associated Press. “I wanted to give others the chance to pursue their dreams of playing in the NBA. It is the decision of the blind trust for the CBA to revert to local ownership. Though disappointing to me personally, the decision allows basketball to continue in the cities that have supported the CBA for many years. This will be good for the players and the communities.”

On February 24, 2001, 18 months after Thomas purchased the CBA, the league declared bankruptcy. Five of the former CBA team owners – the Sioux Falls SkyForce, the Gary Steelheads, the Rockford Lightning, the Grand Rapids Hoops and the Connecticut Pride – did repurchase their franchises, and joined another independent minor league, just to finish their schedules out.

The IBL folded in the summer of 2001, but four of the CBA teams refused to go quietly into that dark night. In November 2001, four CBA teams – the Gary (Ind.) Steelheads, Rockford Lightning, Grand Rapids Hoops and Sioux Falls SkyForce – merged with another basketball organization, the International Basketball Association (IBA), with franchises in Bismarck (Dakota Wizards), Fargo (Fargo-Moorhead Beez) and Saskatoon (Saskatchewan Hawks), with the Flint (Mich.) Fuze joining as an expansion team. Thus began the 56th season of the Continental Basketball Association.

The CBA, without any NBA developmental league contract or money, continued to soldier on. The league averaged seven to ten teams on their roster, but it was a slog. Agents wanted their players in the D-League, where they were more likely to receive a call-up to the NBA. Meanwhile, the CBA teams were spread across the country, and in some cases the franchises were two connecting flights away from each other.

By the end of the 2006 season, the CBA hoped to regain its position as one of the top American independent pro leagues. It was at that point that of the eight teams on the roster, three joined the D-League, three more folded, leaving two teams – in Albany, N.Y. and Yakima, Wash. – in the CBA.

Although the league did get some new franchises to continue on, many of those franchises were either underfunded or had no business operating a professional team (the Atlanta Krunk, for example, was bankrolled by C+C Music Factory lead singer Freedom Williams, but the team played their games on the campus of Morris Brown University, and folded partway through their debut season).

The CBA played its last season in 2008-29, when the Lawton-Fort Sill Cavalry won the last-ever CBA championship.

There are so many “what if’s” with this story. What if Isiah Thomas took the NBA’s offer for the CBA? What if Isiah Thomas found a buyer for the league after he took the Pacers coaching job? What if he didn’t buy the CBA at all?

For all the things Thomas did after his stint with the CBA – coaching the Knicks, working in the front office, etc. – his involvement with the CBA shows that even one of the greatest guards in the history of professional basketball was completely over his head as a league owner.

The CBA certainly deserved better.

6 Comments

  1. We Detroiters will always love Zeke for what he did here. Those Pistons teams were wonderful for so long.

    But goddamn has his post-playing career been a disaster at every turn. He doesn’t belong in the sport, and it’s better that he’s been out since the sexual harassment allegations. Dude’s embarrassing himself.

  2. Thanks for this, it was a good read and pretty damn informative too. I didn’t have much, if any, prior knowledge of the CBA’s demise and Thomas’ hand in it; like Constantine said, the dude’s been an all around disaster since he hung up his playing kicks

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