Providence Shooting Stars

Eastern Basketball Association (1977-1978)

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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

Robert “Skip” Chernov was a rock promoter and scene maker in Providence, Rhode Island during the early 1970’s. He promoted shows by Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Janis Joplin and others. He landed the New England closed circuit broadcast rights to the 1971 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier heavyweight title fight. The 20-something hustler owned a nightclub downtown called “The Incredible Organ” and posed nude in Providence’s alt weekly the point. In the spring of 1977, Chernov made bids of dubious sincerity to purchase either the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and New York Nets and bring the NBA to Rhode Island.

The NBA stunt came to naught. Instead, Chernov bought an expansion franchise in the minor league Eastern Basketball Association several months later, in September 1977, for the rather more reasonable price of around $3,000. Just a few weeks later, Chernov unloaded the basketball team to three local businessmen for a reported price of $250 during a drinking binge. Chernov, an acknowledged alcoholic, went to rehab and filed suit in November 1977 in an unsuccessful attempt to void the sale.

Demise

Chernov was probably lucky to get out from under responsibility for the team. The Shooting Stars got their first season under way in December 1977 under the direction of the team’s new ownership troika. The team played in the tiny West Warwick Athletic Center, which seated fewer than 2,000 fans. By the end of December, President and part-owner John C. Davis was openly talking in the press about dumping the team.

Somehow the club staggered along until April 1978 and finished their only campaign with a record of 9-19. The Shooting Stars were booted from the Eastern Basketball Association due to financial insolvency in July 1978.

Aftermath: Providence Steamrollers Stunt

Believe it or not, Skip Chernov returned with an even stranger round ball ploy in April of 1980. He purchased the rights to the old Providence Steamrollers franchise of the Basketball Association of America from the estate of the team’s late owner, Louis Pieri, in 1979. In 1949, the same year that the BAA merged with the National Basketball League to form the modern NBA, league owners voted to deactivate Pieri’s beleaguered club. The Steamrollers finished the 1948-49 season with a dreadful 3-49 record.

Possessed of the deceased Pieri’s old franchise certificate some three decades later, Chernov sued to enter the Providence Steamrollers into the NBA for the 1980-81 season. Chernov argued that the 1949 motion by the league’s board of directors to suspend the Steamrollers placed no restrictions on when the club could be re-activated. Furthermore, Chernov argued that he should get the #1 overall pick in the June 1980 NBA Draft based on the Steamrollers last place finish in the 1948-49 season. A federal court judge in Providence tossed the case in June 1980.

Skip Chernov died in 2001.

The Eastern Basketball Association re-branded itself as the Continental Basketball Association shortly after the Shooting Stars folded in 1978. The league became the official developmental league of the NBA during the 1980’s and 1990’s and played on in various forms until 2009.

Links

Eastern Professional Basketball League Programs

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