Puerto Rico Coquis

Continental Basketball Association (1983-1985)

Tombstone

Born: 1983 – CBA expansion franchise
Moved: June 1985 (Maine Windjammers)

First Game: December 3, 1985 (W 105-97 vs. Sarasota Stingers)
Last Game: March 10, 1985 (W 137-122 vs. Toronto Tornados)

CBA Championships: None

Arenas

1983-84: Mets Pavilion (7,000)¹

1983-84: Bachin Vicens Coliseum (9,000)²

1984-85: Municipal Coliseum (3,500)³

Marketing

Team Colors:

1983-84: Royal Blue & Green⁴
1984-85: Yellow, Black & Orange⁵

Ownership

Owner: Walter Fournier

Trophy Case

CBA Most Valuable Player

1983-84: Geff Crompton

CBA Coach of the Year

1983-84: Herb Brown

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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

Professional basketball came to the island of Puerto Rico in the winter of 1983, when local insurance man Walter Fournier acquired an expansion franchise in the Continental Basketball Association. Fournier dubbed his team the Coquis, named after the tiny tree frogs native to Puerto Rico and the surrounding islands of the Caribbean.

The CBA in the early 1980’s was a league on the rise. For most of the post-war era, the league was known as the Eastern Professional Basketball League (or variations thereof) and was a bus league built on the small mill cities of Pennsylvania. The league began to expand aggressively the late 1970’s, adopting the ambitious “Continental” moniker and adding far-flung teams in Anchorage and Honolulu. The CBA also managed to sign a partnership as the official developmental league of the NBA. By the early 1980’s, the CBA’s top players regularly landed 10-day contacts with NBA clubs to fill in as spare parts when their regulars went down with injuries.

Despite the trappings and pretensions, the CBA remained, at its core, a league of near-insolvent clubs dependent on bus travel. The notion of putting a club in Puerto Rico may have had some publicity appeal for the league, but the reality was that poor clubs who couldn’t rub two nickels together now had to fund extravagant (by CBA standards) road trips to San Juan to play the Coquis.

On The Floor

Fournier hired Herb Brown as his Head Coach. Brown, the older brother of former ABA star and longtime NBA coach Larry Brown, served a brief tenure as Head Coach of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons from 1975 to 1977. Brown led the expansion Coquis into the playoffs with a CBA-best record of 28-16 in the spring of 1984.

After dispatching the Lancaster Lightning in the first round of the playoffs, the Coquis fell to the Phil Jackson-coached Albany Patroons in the CBA semi-finals. Brown was named CBA Coach of the Year. Center Geff Crompton was named the league’s Most Valuable Player.

The Coquis success on the court was not reflected in the stands. The team drew an average of just 728 fans per game in San Juan during the 1983-84 season.

Final Season

When the Coquis returned for the 1984-85 campaign, Fournier seemed to have adopted a certain fatalism about the team’s potential in Puerto Rico. For one thing, Fournier believed that Puerto Rican fans would not attend matches during the holidays and he orchestrated a grueling 22-day, 14-game road trip in December 1984 to avoid them.

“I guess it’s a management decision by people who don’t know much about basketball,” Brown complained to Nathan Huang of The St. Petersburg Evening-Independent in the midst of the Coquis’ December 1984 odyssey. “They have absolutely no idea how tough it is.”

The 1984-85 campaign got tougher for Brown. Despite another winning season (27-21), the Coquis entered the final game of the season with a playoff spot on the line against Jackson’s Albany Patroons. Jackson’s assistant Charley Rosen recalled the events that followed in his 2011 memoir Crazy Basketball, A Life In and Out of Bounds. Late in the game, Brown stormed onto the court to challenge a call by referee Ken Mauer. According to Rosen, Brown grabbed the lanyard that held the whistle around Mauer’s beck and twisted it until the head official’s face turned blue. Stadium security intervened, pulling Brown off the referee and letting Mauer live to officiate another day. The Coquis lost and finished out of the playoffs with a 5th place finish. The CBA slapped Brown with a 6-game suspension to start the 1985-86 season.

But by then Brown would be with a new CBA club and the Coquis were no more.

Demise

Attendance failed to improve during the Coquis second season in San Juan, with the club reportedly drawing less than 500 fans per game. In March 1985, Fournier began negotiating to move his club to Birmingham, Alabama’s State Fair Arena. Negotiations fell through with Birmingham officials in the spring of 1985 and Fournier moved the club instead to Bangor, Maine, of all places. Fournier bailed out on the franchise, re-named the Maine Windjammers, during the first month of the season in late 1985.

The owner-less team folded up shop for good in June 1986. The CBA went out of business in 2009.