Continental Basketball Association (2006-2009)
Tombstone
Born: August 2006 – The San Jose Skyrockets relocate to Minot, ND
Folded: February 3, 2009
First Game:
Last Game:
CBA Championships: None
Arena
Marketing
Team Colors:
Ownership
Owner: Apex Sportstainment LLC (Joe Clark, et al.)
OUR FAVORITE STUFF
Continental Basketball Association
Logo T-Shirt
This Old School Shirts release is strictly for the hardcore hoop heads.
Before the NBA had the G-League, it had the CBA with teams stretched from Puerto Rico to Honolulu. During the CBA’s 1980’s and 90’s heyday, the league provided a launching pad for future NBA All-Stars such as John Starks and Michael Adams as well as coaching legends Phil Jackson and George Karl.
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Background
The Minot Skyrockets were a low-budget minor league basketball team from North Dakota that played the final three seasons of the now-defunct Continental Basketball Association (CBA). The CBA, which traced its roots all the way back to 1946, enjoyed a period of semi-prominence during the 1980’s and 1990’s as the official developmental league of NBA. It was more or less triple-A pro basketball with steady of movement of players back and forth between the two leagues.
By the time Minot came on the scene in 2006 those days were long gone. The CBA lost the support of the NBA, who developed their own in-house developmental league, the NBADL (known today as the G-League) to replace it. The CBA went into bankruptcy in 2001 and returned as a substantially weakened and less relevant operation the following year.
Move To Minot
The Skyrockets were part of a cluster of late-era CBA teams in the Upper Midwest owned by a group called Apex Sportstainment. Apex also owned CBA teams in Butte and Great Falls, Montana and (briefly) in Salt Lake City, Utah between 2006 and 2009. The Skyrockets started out as a San Jose-based team in the notoriously disorganized semi-pro American Basketball Association (ABA) in 2005-06. Apex moved the team to Minot in August 2006 and jumped up to the slightly more reputable CBA.
Minot previously had a minor league hoops team called the Magic City Snowbears that played at the Municipal Auditorium from 1997 to 2001.
Demise
The Continental Basketball Association was really on its last legs by this time. The league started the 2007-08 season with ten franchises scattered haphazardly from New York to Georgia to Texas to Washington state. It was an air travel league with bus league revenue. The Skyrockets advanced to the CBA Championship Series in April 2008, losing to the Oklahoma Cavalry 3 games to 2.
The CBA lost six of its 10 teams by the start of the 2008-09 season. The four teams that remained had no geographic logic – North Dakota, Kentucky, New York and Oklahoma. The schedule fell into disarray. At one point in January 2009, the Skyrockets had managed to play just a single league game while Oklahoma had played seven. The CBA folded in mid-season on February 3, 2009.
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