The other ABA: a league of 97 teams, most of which you have never heard of

The confusion is understandable, and the current league does nothing to discourage it. The original American Basketball Association ran nine seasons, from 1967 to 1976, with a three-point line, a 30-second clock and a ball that looked like a beach toy. When it merged into the NBA in 1976, four of its clubs came along: the New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers and the San Antonio Spurs. That league is the one people mean when they talk about the ABA in a sentence about the 1970s.

The league the Sea-Kings played in was founded in 1999 by Dick Tinkham and Joe Newman and tipped off its first season in 2000-01 with eight teams. Wikipedia files it under American Basketball Association (2000-present) to keep the two apart. Newman is still listed as its CEO, and its headquarters sit in Indianapolis. The name, the red, white and blue ball on the logo and the three-point heritage were borrowed on purpose. The business model was not. The old ABA tried to compete with the NBA for players and television money. The new one competes with nobody. It fills gyms in cities the NBA and its G League do not reach, and in that sense it is closer to an adult recreation league with a marketing department than to a major-league rival.

So when the archived Sea-Kings site described the club as playing in the ABA, the reader should picture Stockton on a Saturday afternoon, tip-off at 2:30, not Madison Square Garden. That is not a knock. It is what the league is.

The revived ABA grows by selling markets, and the price of a market has fallen with every reorganization. In its first season each franchise carried a limit of 10 players under a salary cap of $900,000, and Wikipedia records an average player salary around $60,000 in 2000, figures that describe a league with real payroll ambitions. The money did not last. By the 2004-05 season the league had lowered franchise fees from $50,000 to $10,000 and dropped the bond requirement to attract new owners, which is how it reached 37 clubs in three divisions that year. Fees went up to $20,000 for 2006-07, then the cap came down to $120,000 per team in 2007, which Newman described as about $10,000 per player on a 12-man roster, and by the 2017-18 season a franchise cost $2,500. The league's own site today says nothing about price; it advertises minimum investment, minimum risk and great profit potential, invites visitors to reserve a market in their city, and claims over 100 active teams organized into East, Central, South and West regions plus an international division. What a $2,500 fee buys is a name in the standings, a place in the regional schedule and the right to sell tickets, sponsorships and merchandise locally. What it does not buy is a floor under the operation. Each owner rents the gym, pays the referees, drives or flies the players to road games and covers the losses. A club like the Sea-Kings, which lasted 11 seasons, is the exception in that arrangement, and the folded franchises are the rule. Wikipedia counted over 200 teams gone by the 2008-09 season and over 350 by 2013-14, which means that in any given year most of the league's history consists of teams that no longer exist.

Read the table top to bottom and the arc is plain: the league got cheaper to join, the pay got thinner and the roster of teams got longer while the survival rate got worse. The numbers do not disagree with each other so much as describe a business that chose breadth over depth. The ABA's own homepage speaks of opportunities for over 2,000 players and coaches in more than 50 American cities, and that is one honest way to describe it. Another is that most of those opportunities pay in gas money.

The ABA has a house rule it is proud of. Under what it calls the 3D rule, if a team commits a backcourt violation or turns the ball over in its own backcourt, any field goal the opponent scores on the next possession is worth one extra point. It rewards pressure defense and produces odd scorelines, and it is the one thing about the league's on-court product that a casual fan would notice.

The off-court product is the problem. Some of what the Wikipedia entry records:

• After the 2005-06 season, many teams failed to complete their full schedules and became insolvent.
• NBA scouts stopped attending the league's games in January 2009, citing the number of cancelled and forfeited contests.
• The San Francisco Rumble forfeited a playoff game against the Southeast Texas Mavericks because they could not afford to travel.
• In 2009-10, the season the Sea-Kings arrived, many franchises folded midyear and a lot of teams played very few games.
• The 2019-20 season was ended early and the playoffs cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

None of this is hidden. A player weighing an ABA roster spot can read it on the league's public record, and most of them know it from the locker room anyway. The pay, where it exists, tends to be small. Jose Colorado, who surveys players about semipro salaries, reports that many ABA salaries fall between $50 and $100 a month and that the sum is sometimes meant to cover gas and food rather than to serve as wages. Teams that pay more, and some do, are choosing to. The league does not make them.

Eleven seasons in a league where most teams do not see three.

The Sea-Kings were founded in 2008 and entered the ABA for the 2009 season, which the league's records count as 2009-10. Wikipedia's standings for that year put them in a North California division with the San Francisco Rumble, Clayton Showtime and the Sacramento Heatwave, and credit them with a 16-12 record. Of those four names, the Sea-Kings are the one that was still playing a decade later. Wikipedia's own reference for the club's arrival is a November 29, 2008 release headed ABA adds Monterey, California to 2009 expansion list, which is a reminder that the club's roots run to the Monterey Bay side of the region as much as to San Jose.

By the 2019-20 season the archived team site was listing a schedule against Team Trouble in Stockton, the Solano Stallions in Solano, the San Diego Guardians in San Diego, and home dates in Monterey County against the San Diego Kings, the Orange County Nova Stars, Team Trouble and the San Francisco City Cats, with Far West Division playoffs pencilled in for March and an Elite 8 in Binghamton, New York for April. The league cancelled those playoffs when the pandemic arrived. On November 23, 2020, The Basketball League announced the Sea-Kings would join it for the 2021 season, and Wikipedia's account of that TBL season names the Sea-Kings among several teams that came over from what it calls the semi-professional ABA. Eleven years is a long run in this league. Whatever else the record says about the club, it says that.