The Eastern Canadian Basketball League will end regular season play earlier than scheduled.
Their last regular season games will be played on May 21.
The inaugural ECBL Championship Shootout Tournament will be played the following weekend from May 26-28, but a venue has not been chosen yet.
League CEO and owner Ravi Verma said the decision to conclude the regular season was a difficult one, “We believe professional basketball can work in the Maritimes, but to achieve this, we need to restructure and change the way we operate so we can come back stronger and more secure in 2024.”
League Vice-President Dwaye Tingley says, “Our expenses were a little higher than we expected. I know there’s a lot of blame to share on this one, and we have to look at ourselves and the way we projected the season. We weren’t really as prepared as we should have been, but we hope to come back bigger and better than ever than 2024.”
Current season ticket holders and sponsors will be offered reduced rates for next season and two Championship Shootout ticket packages.
“I’m very disappointed, in this whole thing. I’m disappointed because I know there weren’t as great numbers as we anticipated, but there is a basketball community out there that just loves this product. They really embraced us and they embraced the league and I feel bad for all those people who enjoyed going there once a week or once every 10 days to see the games. It was fun to see everybody having a good time, and we’re going to try to bring that back. We just have to do it with bigger numbers all around,” Tingley adds.
The Bathurst Bears, Charlottetown Power, Moncton Motion, Saint John Union, Truro Tide and Valley Vipers were all a part of the ECBL.
As for the players, some were from the Maritimes, while others came from the United States to play, “All of the players for all the teams will be invited to the final championship tournament, and they’ll participate but then they’ll be going home immediately after the tournament. Some of them will probably be flying out that night or early the next week, unfortunately. We feel bad for the players, they played hard and they gave everything they had. But this was not in the cards right now,” Tingley says.
The league was first publicly announced in Moncton in August 2022. At a news conference, League President Tim Kendrick said, “The league will operate as a single ownership group instead of having teams individually owned.”
The hope was the league would take off in the Maritimes and would be around for many years to come.
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