Minor league basketball, explained by the people who get paid in gas money

There is no official pyramid in American basketball. Nobody promotes or relegates anyone. The tiers below are an outsider's sorting, based on who owns the teams, what the players are paid and whether the schedule gets played.

• NBA G League. Founded in 2001 as the National Basketball Development League, renamed the NBA Development League in 2005 and the NBA G League in 2017 after a naming deal with Gatorade, which made it the first American professional league named for an advertiser. Thirty-one teams; as of 2024-25 every one is owned by or affiliated with an NBA club except the independent Mexico City Capitanes.
• The Basketball League. Founded in 2017, first season in 2018 as North America Premier Basketball, owned and run by Dave and Evelyn Magley. Forty teams for 2026 after peaking at 49 in 2023. Privately owned franchises with a six-figure entry fee and a monthly wage.
• The American Basketball Association. Founded in 1999, first season 2000-01. Ninety-seven teams completed at least one game in 2025-26. Franchise fee of $2,500 as of 2017-18, pay set by each owner, high turnover.
• Independents and regional circuits. Leagues that come and go, sometimes founded by owners who left one of the leagues above. Wikipedia records two formed after the 2025 TBL season alone, the 94x50 League and a new United States Basketball League, out of 13 departing clubs.

The word semipro gets used loosely across all of this. Wikipedia applies it to the ABA. TBL and the G League describe themselves as professional. A working definition: if the players need a day job, it is semipro.

Sources for the table: Wikipedia's articles on the three leagues and on the 2024-25 G League season, Sports Illustrated and Front Office Sports on G League pay, the NBA's own explainer on two-way contracts, TBL's FAQ, Jose Colorado's salary surveys, and the Sea-Kings' archived 2019-20 schedule. One caution on the G League season: Wikipedia breaks the 2024-25 year into 16 Tip-Off Tournament games and 34 regular-season games, while Sports Illustrated calls it a 50-game regular season. Same 50 games, different labels.

Money is the cleanest way to tell the tiers apart, so it is worth walking down the ladder one rung at a time. At the top, a G League player on a standard contract earns $40,500 for a season that runs about five months, which Front Office Sports works out to roughly $810 a game, plus housing and insurance, and a player who gets called up to the NBA collects bonuses that Wikipedia puts at up to $50,000; the better path is a two-way contract, which the NBA allows each of its teams to hand to as many as three players in their fourth season or earlier, pays half the rookie minimum, $578,577 in 2024-25, and limits the player to 50 games on the NBA active list while he spends the rest of the year with the affiliate. One rung down, TBL's own FAQ says its players earn $500 to $5,000 a month, and the survey Jose Colorado published with Dave Magley's review found half of respondents between $1,300 and $1,800 a month across a season of three to three and a half months, with some clubs adding housing and meals for players from out of town and per diem on the road, which is to say a decent player can clear $5,000 or $6,000 for a spring of basketball and go home with film and a stat line to send abroad. Another rung down, the ABA leaves pay entirely to the owner: the league carried a $120,000 team cap from 2007 that Joe Newman described as about $10,000 a player, but Colorado's survey found many ABA salaries at $50 to $100 a month and noted that the money was sometimes meant to cover gas and food rather than to serve as income, and his wider survey of North American semipro leagues put the bulk of players between $50 and $200 a month with many playing for free and a select few topping out near $3,000. Below that, in the independents, there is no published data at all, which tells you most of what you need to know. The pattern is not subtle. Each step down the ladder moves the money from the player's pocket toward the owner's expenses, until at the bottom the player is subsidizing the team with his own gas tank. That is the level at which the Sea-Kings operated for 11 seasons, and every player who suited up in Monterey County or Stockton on a Saturday afternoon knew it going in.

The bus is the budget. When the bus money runs out, the team does.

Travel is where minor-league basketball dies, and the public record is blunt about it. Wikipedia's account of the ABA notes that the San Francisco Rumble forfeited a playoff game against the Southeast Texas Mavericks because they could not afford the trip, that many teams after 2005-06 failed to complete their schedules, and that NBA scouts stopped coming to games in January 2009 because of cancellations and forfeits. By 2013-14 the count of folded ABA franchises stood above 350. The Sea-Kings' 2019-20 schedule shows how a careful West Coast club managed it: road games in Stockton, Solano and San Diego, all reachable by van in a day, and home dates in Monterey County against opponents making the same drive in reverse.

TBL asks more of its owners and loses them in a different way. Its 2021 expansion added clubs faster than they could open, and the season page notes that several announced teams never played because of venue and business conditions in the pandemic. After 2025, 13 clubs walked out to found two rival leagues. Even the top tier is not immune: the G League Ignite, a prospect team the league launched in 2020, folded after the 2023-24 season. The difference is that when a G League team closes, an NBA franchise absorbs the loss. When an ABA team closes, a local owner does, and the players find out by text.

On this ladder the Sea-Kings spent most of their life on the ABA rung. Founded in 2008, they entered the league for the 2009 season; Wikipedia's standings for 2009-10 place them in a North California division at 16-12 alongside the San Francisco Rumble, Clayton Showtime and Sacramento Heatwave, three clubs that did not last the way the Sea-Kings did. Their archived 2019-20 schedule reads like a map of the ABA West: Team Trouble, the Solano Stallions, the San Diego Guardians, the San Diego Kings, the Orange County Nova Stars, the San Francisco City Cats.

On November 23, 2020, The Basketball League announced the club would join for 2021, which in the terms of this page means the Sea-Kings moved up a rung, from a $2,500 league to a $600,000 one, in the middle of a pandemic. Wikipedia's 2021 TBL season page lists them at 9-11 in the West Conference, with a bye to the conference semifinals and a series loss to the San Diego Guardians, a club that had made the same move. The 2022 standings show them at 20-4 in the West division, marked conference champion; from 2023 the league's season pages list them only among former teams. Eleven seasons at the bottom of the professional ladder and two a rung higher: that is the club's place in the sport, and it is a more durable record than most teams in either league can show.