The short-lived Jacksonville Jets had played all of ten days in their new home city before team owner Ted Stepien began threatening to move his nomadic Continental Basketball Association (CBA) franchise. Again.
The Pensacola Tornados were actually two separate Continental Basketball Association franchises that operated in the Florida panhandle in the late 1980’s and early 90’s. The first Tornados team arrived abruptly in December 1985, when Ted Stepien, owner of the CBA’s Toronto Tornados, yanked his team out of Ontario and moved it south one month in the 1985-86 season.
The Mississippi Jets were a chaotic, Biloxi-based minor league basketball team that played parts of two seasons in the Continental Basketball Association in 1987 and 1988. The team’s dysfunction encompassed the front office, headed by the notorious and disruptive former Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien, and several talented but troubled scoring stars on the Jets’ roster. The team moved to Wichita Falls, Texas in 1988.
World Basketball League (1992) National Basketball League (1993) Born: 1991 – WBL expansion franchise Moved: 1993 (Edmonton Skyhawks) First Game: May 1, 1992 (L 111-105 against
During the 1982-83 NBA season, despised Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien threatened to move his woeful club to Toronto. It was one of the final missteps in a four-year marathon of civic humiliations that began with a 1979 Rave Magazine interview where Stepien opined that the Cavaliers had “too many black players”. The gaffes spanned his disastrous three-year reign as Cavs’ owner from 1980 to 1983. The Cavs’ move to Toronto never came to pass and Stepien mercifully divested himself of the Cavaliers in the spring of 1983. But oddly, the reviled owner ended up with his Toronto hoops team anyway.
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