The Raleigh Cougars low-level minor league basketball outfit founded by former N.C. State star and Harlem Globetrotter Clyde “The Glide” Austin. The team’s name recalled the old Carolina Cougars club that played in the American Basketball Association in the early 1970’s. The Cougars’ biggest name was Lorenzo Charles, who famously slammed home a buzzer-beating dunk to lift N.C. State to the 1983 NCAA championship.
The Springfield Fame was a minor league basketball outfit that played two summer seasons in Western Massachusetts in 1985 and 1986. Springfield is the host city of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which inspired the team’s name. Future NBA All-Star guard Michael Adams and female star Nancy Lieberman both played for the Fame during the team’s brief existence.
The Wildwood Aces were one of seven founding franchises in the United States Basketball League in the summer of 1985. The USBL started out as a low-level minor league loop in New England, New York and New Jersey, but in later seasons expanded as far afield as Kansas. The Aces’ top name was former Villanova star Stewart Granger, a former 1st round pick of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers in 1983.
The Gary Steelheads were an Indiana minor league basketball franchise that competed in three different minor professional leagues between 2000 and 2008. Steelheads investors had the misfortune of purchasing a Continental Basketball Association franchise just as the NBA prepared to launch its own proprietary farm league, the NBA Development League (known today as the “G-League”). The NBA’s league undermined the rationale and investment prospects for the remaining independent minor pro basketball leagues, most of which closed their doors by the end of the 2000’s.
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