Eastern Canadian Basketball League forced to end inaugural season

MONCTON -

Around half way into its inaugural season, the Eastern Canadian Basketball League cancelled the remainder of the regular season due to financial difficulties.

Vice President, Dwayne Tingley says what went wrong really is the million dollar question.

“I think as a league we have to look inward,” he said. “What did we do wrong?”

Most prominent, he says that he doesn’t think the league projected the costs accurately.

“Early on we had trouble finding accommodations for the players in all the centres, apartments, you know, accommodations are issues everywhere, but in places like Moncton and Saint John, they’re very high rent, we didn’t project that,” he said.

There are six teams in the league: The Bathurst Bears, Charlottetown Power, Moncton Motion, Saint John Union, Truro Tide and Valley Vipers.

“I think every team in the league had one or two Maritimers on their teams too so that’s kind of disappointing for them. This is their home region, they want the league to succeed and I think they’re probably going to take it harder than anybody,” he said.

The teams have, on average, ten players, which about half coming from the United States.

“I sense probably a few of them sensed this was coming,” said Tingley.

“There were some late paydays, to be perfectly frank, all the players have been paid, but some of them were late. So probably word got around a little bit that there’s something up and I think they’re going to be disappointed.”

He says the league also didn’t receive as many sponsorships or season ticket sales as they would have liked. However, he’s hopeful that the ECBL will be able to return for 2024.

“I think people are forgiving, you know, obviously a lot of disappointed people, basketball people are going to be very disappointed with this,” he said.

“People are going to be forgiving as long as you don’t keep making the same mistakes and I think we have to learn from our mistakes and let’s grow from there.”

While regular play has come to a halt, the league is still going to put on a Championship Shootout Tournament May 26-28 to officially wrap up the season.

Current season ticket holders and sponsors will be given two ticket packages for the championships and a discount for next years passes, but refunds won’t be made for the rest of this season.

“What we’re doing is giving people a deep discount on next year’s tickets and I think that’s the best we can do,” said Tingley.

“We can’t do any better than that because we don’t have any revenue. There’s no revenue to distribute refunds right now. It says on the tickets, you know, not refundable and I hate doing that and I hate saying that.”

Tingley says that the plan is to work hard over the next few months in order to have the league up and running for 2024. 

“This can be successful,” he said, thanking the people who did show support this year.

“I think the Maritimes is ready for something like this and hopefully we come back bigger and stronger next year.”

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