Basketball in San Jose, a city that never kept a pro team

Here is the contradiction the rest of this page hangs on. San Jose is bigger than San Francisco and bigger than Oakland, it sits at the bottom of a bay that has supported an NBA team since 1962, and it has an 18,543-seat arena downtown that opened in 1993 and has hosted NCAA tournament games in 2002, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2017 and 2019. Yet the only NBA basketball played there as a home schedule was a single season, 1996-97, when the Warriors moved south while their Oakland building was rebuilt. They went 30-52 that year, drew 621,844 fans over the regular season, ranked 23rd in the league at the gate, and went back north. The city's professional basketball history since then is a list of leagues most people cannot name: the CBA, the ABL, the 2000-revival ABA, the TBL. San Jose supports hockey at SAP Center, soccer at its own stadium and a minor-league hockey club at Tech CU Arena. Basketball has been the sport it watches on television from somewhere else.

The oldest thread is the university. San Jose State played its first recorded basketball game in 1909 and has cycled through eight conferences since, landing in the Mountain West in 2013. The program's all-time record stands at 1,193 wins against 1,506 losses, a .442 winning percentage, and it has reached the NCAA tournament three times, in 1951, 1980 and 1996, losing each time. The 1996 trip ended 110-72 against Kentucky as a 16 seed. There are ten conference titles on the wall, the last two from 1980 and 1996, and two NIT trips, in 1981 and 2025.

Home is the Provident Credit Union Event Center at 290 South 7th Street, on campus and a short walk from downtown. It opened on September 8, 1989 as the Event Center Arena, cost $31 million to build, seats 5,000 for basketball, and took its current name in 2019 under an $8.1 million, 20-year naming deal. Both the men's and women's teams have played there since it opened. The women's program dates to 1895 at what was then San Jose Normal School. Lamisha Augustine became its first WNBA draft pick in 2006, and in 2015 the eighth-seeded Spartans beat top-seeded Colorado State in the Mountain West tournament, the first time an eight had beaten a one in that event.

The men had a modest lift in the 2020s. Tim Miles took the job in 2021 and was named Mountain West Coach of the Year in 2023, the same season Omari Moore was the conference's Player of the Year. The best-known recent Spartan never finished there: Brandon Clarke played two seasons in San Jose, 2015 to 2017, transferred to Gonzaga, and went 21st overall in the 2019 NBA draft. That is the pattern for South Bay talent. It develops here and gets noticed somewhere else.

Twelve Spartans have been drafted by the NBA in more than a century of play.

Count the entries in this table and then notice how few of them lasted more than a few seasons in the same building.

Oakland is up the east side of the bay, and since 2019 the Warriors have played at Chase Center in San Francisco, farther still. Distance has not mattered. The franchise has been in the Bay Area since 1962, won titles in 1975, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022, and treats Santa Clara County as home ground for its television, ticket and merchandise business. The G League affiliate landed even closer: the Dakota Wizards relocated to Santa Cruz for the 2012-13 season, play at Kaiser Permanente Arena about 40 miles south of San Jose, and won a D-League title in 2015.

A South Bay fan who wants to see professional basketball in person can drive over the hill to Santa Cruz or up the peninsula to San Francisco, and either trip offers a higher standard of play than any independent minor league can. That is the market a club like the Sea-Kings walked into. It is hard to sell a seat for semipro ball when a G League game with NBA-contracted players is a short drive away.

Below all of that sits the part nobody writes down. San Jose is a big, spread-out city with a mild climate and close to 300 days of sunshine a year, which means outdoor courts stay in use through the winter and the school gyms fill with rec leagues on weeknights. Santa Clara University's Leavey Center is a few miles up the road, where Steve Nash played from 1992 to 1996 and where Jalen Williams played before going 12th overall in 2022. Between the university programs, the park leagues, the church leagues and the adult runs, there is a steady supply of grown men who can play and are not going to be paid to do it anywhere else. That is the labor pool for a minor-league club, and it is what such a club offers back to the city.

• A roster spot for players who were good at a junior college or a Division II program and are not finished.
• Weekend home dates priced for families, in a gym rather than an arena.
• Game film and statistics a player can send to an agent working the overseas market.
• A local business name on the jersey and a reason for the owner to show up at community events.

The Sea-Kings fit that model. Founded in 2008, they joined the 2000-revival ABA for the 2009 season, played eleven seasons there, and were announced as a TBL club on November 23, 2020 for a first season starting in March 2021. Their ABA schedule reads like a map of Northern California's semipro circuit: Team Trouble out of Stockton, the Solano Stallions, the San Francisco City Cats, the Oakland Bay Hawks, the Contra Costa Delta Stars, a San Jose Knights side, and Southern California trips to San Diego and Orange County.

Which brings up an honest complication. Wikipedia files the Sea-Kings under San Jose, and this site keeps that framing because it is the public record. But the club's own 2019-20 schedule placed its home dates in Monterey County, and the TBL's expansion notice of November 2020 described it as a Seaside club on the Central Coast, with its president, Vic Goodwin, speaking for it. Seaside is a Monterey County city of 32,366 people, a couple of miles from Monterey and a long drive from downtown San Jose. So the team competed for attention in two markets at once and was the headline act in neither. In San Jose it was one more small-league name below the Spartans, the Sharks and the Warriors on the sports page. On the Monterey Bay side it played to a population a fraction of San Jose's size. Add the economics of the leagues it belonged to, where the ABA's franchise fee had dropped to $2,500 by 2017-18 and more than 350 franchises had folded by 2014, and eleven ABA seasons followed by a TBL invitation starts to look like a long run for a club at this level.