Eastern Basketball Association (1977-1978)
Tombstone
Born: October 1977 – Eastern Basketball Association expansion franchise
Folded: 1978
First Game: November 26, 1977 (L 131-114 @ Long Island Ducks)
Last Game: April 2, 1978 (W 172-145 @ Jersey Shore Bullets)
EBA Championships: None
Arena
Roosevelt Hall (1,500)11977-78 Eastern Basketball Association Official Guide
Marketing
Team Colors: Green & Gold21977-78 Eastern Basketball Association Official Guide
Ownership
Owner: Al Verssen
Editor's Pick
Boxed Out
Remembering The Eastern Professional Basketball League
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 Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team recorded its final out at Ebbets Field on September 24th, 1957 and left Crown Heights for Los Angeles soon afterwards. The beloved ballpark met the wrecking ball in February 1960, making way for gargantuan apartment blocks.
The baseball Dodgers, of course, are whom everyone talks about when they speak of the Brooklyn Dodgers these days. But the name was actually used by a variety of teams over the years across various sports. The Dodgers were a pre-War entry in the National Football League from 1930-1943. A few years after the demolition of Ebbets Field, a minor league football Dodgers team formed in 1966 with Jackie Robinson in place as general manager.
Today we’ll look at (to my knowledge) the last team to adopt the “Dem Bums” identity: the minor league Brooklyn Dodgers basketball team of 1977-1978.
The Dodgers were a new entry in the Eastern Basketball Association, a 30-year old weekends-only circuit that historically played in Pennsylvania with occasional forays into New York, New Jersey, New England and Delaware.
Al Verssen, a local high school math teacher who also operated a print shop in Greenpoint, owned the Dodgers. A short profile of Verssen ran in the New Yorker in February 19783Singer, Mark. “Screened”. The New Yorker. February 6, 1978 and depicted his Dodgers as a classic mom-and-pop operation. (Or perhaps just a “Pop” operation, as no Mrs. Verssen was described.) Verssen worked the door at Brooklyn College’s Roosevelt Hall gymnasium, where the team played nearly all of its 15 home games on Sunday evenings at 7:30 PM. The team was lucky to draw a few hundred fans per game, a number of whom were typically let in for free by the easy-going owner.
In Competition
The team struggled in competition, finishing with the second worst record in the 10-team EBA at 8-22. Despite the lack of wins, the Dodgers did feature the top two scorers in the league. Former University of Georgia star Jacky Dorsey (32.8 points per game) was a 2nd round draft pick of the New Orleans Jazz in 1976. In addition to 17 appearances with the Dodgers, Dorsey also played a handful of NBA games with Denver and Portland during the 1977-78 season. He would later player partial seasons with the Houston Rockets and Seattle SuperSonics between 1978 and 1981.
Guard Glen Williams (31.8 ppg) ranked 2nd in the league in scoring as rookie out of St. John’s. Williams was a 2nd round draft pick of the Milwaukee Bucks in 1977 before joining the Dodgers. Unlike Dorsey, Williams would never see action in the NBA.
Demise
After the season, the EBA changed its name to the Continental Basketball Association and set out on a course of nationwide expansion. The process actually began a year earlier when an Anchorage, Alaska franchise (!) joined the EBA alongside the Pros. The Anchorage Northern Knights agreed to cover the travel costs for all of the Eastern clubs to make one road trip per season to Alaska. Brooklyn went out to Anchorage for a two-game swing on January 7th-8th, 1978, losing both contests.
Verssen’s humble operation was no longer viable in a league with such ambitions and the Dodgers quietly folded in 1978.
Trivia
The EBA was viewed as a no-defense league and the Dodgers results from 1977-78 bear it out. In 30 games, the Dodgers never held an opponent under 100 points. The Dodgers themselves only failed to break the 100-point barrier on one occasion during the season. In their highest scoring shootout of the season, the Dodgers beat the Quincy Chiefs 169-167 on December 17, 1977 in a non-overtime contest!41978-79 Continental Basketball Association Official Guide
In Memoriam
Guard Glen Williams passed away on May 10, 2017 at age 63 after a long battle with cancer. USA Today obituary.
Links
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