The Basketball League, and what changed when the Sea-Kings joined it

In July 2017, Dave Magley and Severko Hrywnak announced a new league called North America Premier Basketball. Magley had played 14 games for the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1982-83 and had been commissioner of the National Basketball League of Canada from May 2015, and the pitch was a winter-spring league in mid-sized markets with a higher floor of professionalism than the semipro circuits below it. NAPB played its first season in 2018 with eight teams. The Yakima SunKings beat the Albany Patroons for the first championship.

After that season Dave Magley and his wife Evelyn Magley took the league over as sole owners and renamed it The Basketball League. Evelyn Magley is the CEO, Dave Magley the president. Wikipedia lists Carlnel Wiley as commissioner. The league's stated purpose, in Evelyn Magley's words to the press, is to be a showcase league that gives players opportunities. It does not use buyout clauses, so a player who lands an overseas or G League contract midseason can leave, and the league sells that freedom as a feature. It also promises video and statistics for every game, which she has said matters most to players trying to get a contract abroad, because film and numbers are what an overseas agent asks for first.

The point of listing all this is that TBL was designed as a step up from the ABA rather than a competitor to it. Where the ABA sells markets for a few thousand dollars and lets owners do as they please, TBL charges a great deal more and writes rules about how a franchise must operate.

Start with the entry fee, because everything else follows from it. Wikipedia's current account of the league states that a TBL franchise costs $600,000, payable on installment, plus a $10,000 annual fee for officiating, and that owners are expected to run annual operating budgets of $200,000 to $300,000; the ABA, by contrast, lowered its franchise fee to $2,500 for the 2017-18 season, and its own website advertises minimum investment and minimum risk. That gap in the price of admission shows up in every other line of the comparison. TBL's own FAQ page says the average salary range for its players is $500 to $5,000 a month, and Jose Colorado, who collects salary reports from players and had his figures checked by Dave Magley, found that half of the players he surveyed fell between $1,300 and $1,800 a month, with some clubs covering housing and food for out-of-town players and paying per diem on road trips. The same writer's survey of ABA players put many of their salaries at $50 to $100 a month, and sometimes that money was meant for gas. TBL also sets a season and expects clubs to play it: the 2020 announcement of the Sea-Kings described a 24-game schedule, 12 at home and 12 away, starting in March and running to playoffs in June, while the league's FAQ says the season runs March to June and Wikipedia says February through May, a discrepancy that reflects the calendar shifting from year to year rather than any dispute about the shape of it. The ABA, on the other hand, has a public record of teams that failed to finish their schedules, forfeited playoff games because they could not afford the bus, and drove NBA scouts away in 2009. The Sea-Kings announcement spelled out what TBL demands of a franchise in return for its fee: livestreaming of games, statistics, venue specifications and consistent scheduling. Whether every TBL club has lived up to that is a fair question; Colorado reports players telling him that income and professionalism drop off steeply outside the marquee markets such as Albany and Syracuse. But the demand exists on paper, and in the ABA it does not.

Two things in that table deserve a closer look. The first is the jump from 12 to 29 or 36 in 2021, depending on which Wikipedia page you read. The league page says 29; the season page says the league had expanded to 36 as of December 30, 2020, and then notes that several announced clubs, the Albany Patroons among them, sat the year out because of business conditions and venue availability in the pandemic. Both numbers are right in their own way. The Sea-Kings were part of that wave, and Wikipedia's 2021 season article names them among several teams that came over from the ABA.

The second is the drop after 2025. Thirteen teams left the league at the end of that season. Seven of them formed the 94x50 League and five formed a new United States Basketball League, and Wikipedia records that the departing owners likened TBL to a pyramid scheme and said the Magley family had too much control. That is one side of a dispute, and this site has no way to referee it. What can be said is that a $600,000 entry fee concentrates a lot of money at the league office, and that when a league is owned by a single family the owners' complaints tend to sound like that.

After 11 seasons in one league, the club paid to enter a harder one.

The Wikipedia entry on the club puts it in one sentence: after 11 seasons the team decided to become a professional basketball team. That is a polite way of saying the ABA was not one, or not reliably. The 2019-20 ABA season had ended early, its playoffs cancelled, and the club's archived schedule for that winter, all of it against ABA West teams from Stockton to San Diego, is the last ABA slate the record shows.

The TBL release quoted the club's president, Vic Goodwin, saying the chance to join TBL was just what the organization had been looking for, and quoted Evelyn Magley saying that a team in that part of California let the league keep growing in a state it valued. The release placed the club in Seaside, on the Central Coast, which is worth noting because Wikipedia lists the Sea-Kings in San Jose and the archived 2019-20 schedule put home games in Monterey County. The sources do not agree on a hometown, and the honest reading is that the club's footprint ran from Santa Clara County down to the Monterey Bay. What the announcement did not do is criticize the ABA. Nobody in these releases ever does.

Wikipedia's account of the 2021 TBL season, which started in April with a 24-game schedule and finished with the Enid Outlaws beating the Syracuse Stallions for the title, lists the Sea-Kings in the West Conference at 9-11, with a bye to the conference semifinals and a 2-0 series loss there to the San Diego Guardians, one of the same clubs they had been playing in the ABA a year before. The opponents were familiar. The league around them was not. The second season went better: Wikipedia's 2022 standings show the Sea-Kings at 20-4 in the West division, marked as conference champion, in a year the Shreveport Mavericks took the title. After that the club drops out of the league's season pages and appears only in the list of former teams.

Pulled from the league's Wikipedia entry and the Sea-Kings announcement, the obligations a TBL owner takes on look like this:

• A $600,000 entry fee, payable in installments, and a $10,000 annual officiating fee.
• An operating budget of $200,000 to $300,000 a year.
• Livestreamed games with statistics kept to league standards.
• A venue that meets league specifications and a schedule played as published.
• Monthly player pay in the $500 to $5,000 range the league itself cites.

In return, owners receive half the league's sponsorship earnings under the revenue-sharing arrangement Wikipedia describes, plus the marketing value of the word professional. Whether the sums add up is the question every departing owner has answered in his own way. For a reader trying to understand the Sea-Kings' move, the short version is enough: the club left a league where the bar was $2,500 for one where the bar was $600,000, and it did so in the middle of a pandemic.