Sunbury Mercuries

Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball League (1947-48)
Eastern Professional Basketball League (1948-1970)
Eastern Basketball Association (1970-1971)

Tombstone

Born: 1947 – EPBL expansion franchise
Folded: 1971

First Game:
Last Game:

EPBL Champions: 1951

Arenas

1960’s: Shikellamy High School (1,200)¹

Sunbury High School

Selinsgrove High School

Fourth Ward School

Marketing

Team Colors:

Ownership

Owners:

Sunbury Sports Association, Inc.
????-1971: Reynold Wolfe

Boxed Out

Remembering The Eastern Professional Basketball League

By Syl Sobel & Jay Rosenstein

In Boxed out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League, Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein tell the fascinating story of a league that was a pro basketball institution for over 30 years, showcasing top players from around the country. During the early years of professional basketball, the Eastern League was the next-best professional league in the world after the NBA. It was home to big-name players such as Sherman White, Jack Molinas, and Bill Spivey, who were implicated in college gambling scandals in the 1950s and were barred from the NBA, and top Black players such as Hal “King” Lear, Julius McCoy, and Wally Choice, who could not make the NBA into the early 1960s due to unwritten team quotas on African-American players.

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Background

The Sunbury Mercuries were a minor league basketball outfit that operated for 24 seasons in the small Eastern Pennsylvania city of Sunbury. The Eastern League was a weekends-only league featuring teams from Pennsylvania a handful of neighboring states.

The team won their only league title in 1951, sweeping York Victory A.C. in a two-game series. The Mercuries folded following the 1970-71 season.

Notable Mercuries players included Jack Ramsay and Jack McCloskey, who both played for Sunbury during the 1950’s. Ramsay went on to win an NBA championship as Head Coach of the Portland Trailblazers in 1977. He entered the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in the Class of 1992. McCloskey became General Manager of the Detroit Pistons in 1979 and was the front office architect of the Pistons’ back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990.