Continental Basketball Association - History

History

The Continental Basketball Association was a professional basketball minor league from 1946 to 2009. It billed itself as the "World's Oldest Pro Basketball League", since its founding on April 23, 1946, pre-dated (by two months) the founding of the National Basketball Association. The league's original name was the Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball League; it fielded six franchises – five in Pennsylvania (Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, Allentown, Lancaster, and Reading) – with a sixth team in New York (Binghamton, which moved in mid-season to Pottsville, Pennsylvania). In 1948, the league was renamed the Eastern Professional Basketball League. Over the years it would add franchises in several other Pennsylvania cities, including Williamsport, Scranton, and Sunbury, as well as teams in New Jersey (Trenton, Camden, Asbury Park), Connecticut (New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport), Delaware (Wilmington) and Massachusetts (Springfield).

For the 1970-71 season the league rebranded itself the Eastern Basketball Association, operating both as a professional northeastern regional league and as an unofficial feeder system to the NBA and ABA. After its expansion to Anchorage, Alaska in 1977, the league was renamed the Continental Basketball Association for the 1978-79 season. The CBA's first commissioner was Harry Rudolph (father of Mendy Rudolph, one of the first referees in the NBA). Coincidentally, 32 years later in 1977, Jim Drucker (son of Norm Drucker, another top NBA referee) began a 12-year association with the CBA as its deputy commissioner, commissioner (1978–86), general counsel and president of CBA Properties.

During Drucker's term the league expanded from 8 to 14 teams, landed its first national TV contract (with BET) and saw franchise values increase from $5,000 to $500,000. The league also instituted a series of novel rule changes including sudden-death overtime, a no foul-out rule and a change in the way league standings were determined. Under the "7-Point System", seven points were awarded each game: three points for winning a game and one point for every quarter a team won. As a result a winning team would wind up with four to seven points in the standings, while a losing team could collect from zero to three points. The league used this method to calculate division standings from its implementation in 1983 until the league's end in 2009.

Also during this time, the CBA created a series of spectacular (for that time) halftime promotions. The most successful was the "1 Million Dollar CBA Supershot". In an era where the typical basketball halftime promotion would feature a winning prize of less than $100, the CBA's Supershot (created in 1983) offered a grand prize of one million dollars if a randomly-selected fan could hit one shot from the far foul line, 69.75 feet (21.26 m). No one won the (insured) prize, but the shot attracted national media coverage for the league in Sports Illustrated, the New York Times and The Sporting News. In 1985, the CBA followed with the "Ton-of-Money Free Throw", which featured a prize of 2,000 pounds (910 kg) of pennies ($5,000) if a randomly-selected fan could make one free throw. Two of fourteen contestants were successful. The next year, the league featured the "Easy Street Shootout". In that contest, 14 contestants were selected (one from each city), and the person making the longest shot was awarded a $1,000,000 zero-coupon bond. The winner was Don Mattingly (no relation to the New York Yankee baseball player), representing the Evansville (Indiana) Thunder. After the league's 1985 All-Star Game in Casper, Wyoming, the CBA invited fans to make a paper airplane from the centerfold of their game program (each identified with a unique serial number) and attempt to throw the paper airplane through the moon roof of a new Ford Thunderbird parked mid-court. Four fans were successful and a tie-breaker determined the winner, who drove home with the new $17,000 personal luxury car.

In 1984, 17 years before the television program American Idol made it common to find an "unknown" and make them a star, the league created the "CBA Sportscaster Contest" to select a color commentator for its weekly game of the week televised on BET. With tryouts in cities nationwide, the promotion gained the league national attention on the NBC Nightly News, Entertainment Tonight, in Sports Illustrated and other media.