Team owner, league brass blown away by Sea Bears debut By: Mike Sawatzky Posted: 4:39 PM CDT Monday, May. 29, 2023

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This article was published 29/05/2023 (1189 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Could the Canadian Elite Basketball League’s Winnipeg debut Saturday have been a bigger success?

It’s hard to imagine anything to top that, given the long pre-game lineups at the merchandise tables, a roaring record-setting crowd of 7,303 filling the lower bowl at Canada Life Centre and a thrilling 90-85 win by the hometown Sea Bears over the Vancouver Bandits.

“It was an extraordinary night and there’s always a huge amount of excitement when there’s something new,” said Sea Bears owner David Asper on Monday. “It was way beyond where we ever thought we would be for that game but we have to be realistic and keep our feet on the ground.”

CEBL commissioner Mike Morreale came away from the experience a little awestruck, beginning with the club’s pre-game party at True North Square.

“The amount (of merchandise) I saw — you would have thought that team had been in town for 10 years,” said Morreale. “It was mind-blowing and the whole thing was surreal. It was like being at a (Toronto) Raptors game. The intensity. The cheering of every bucket and every defensive stand and playing in that arena is instant credibility, right?”

The inaugural game came only six months after Asper first unveiled plans for the expansion team. At the time, seating capacity for games was set at a modest 4,500 per game, essentially the bottom portion of the lower bowl at Canada Life Centre. Demand for tickets quickly outstripped the original supply.

The Sea Bears capped ticket sales when the lower bowl was sold out but could have sold more seats for Saturday’s game in the upper deck.

“There’s a moment when every entrepreneur tries to start a business when you open and you have no idea whether anybody is going to show up and you’ve taken this big risk and it’s a high-tension moment…,” said Asper.

“And so the demand for our merch, even pre-game for weeks in advance of this game, has been has been very steady so I guess I’m not completely surprised… It’s just a gratitude moment where you open your business and people actually show up and want to participate in what you’re doing.”

The Ontario-based Morreale said his ambitions for Winnipeg as a CEBL market were heightened when he attended an exhibition game between Team Canada and the Nigerian national men’s team at Canada Life Centre in the summer of 2019. That game drew approximately 8,000 fans.

“It just made me think, ‘Wow, if they’re coming out for that en mass, there’s a basketball community there that is really engaged and of course there’s the (large local) Filipino population, and all that stuff that plays into that but there are a lot of basketball fans in Winnipeg,” said Morreale, who has been with the CEBL since it was founded in 2017.

“So, to see it happening in some part supported my view, but another part was completely surreal and mind-blowing from my perspective, to see where we’ve come from to where we are today.”

“It was way beyond where we ever thought we would be for that game but we have to be realistic and keep our feet on the ground.”–Sea Bears owner David Asper

Asper, who was among those who partnered with Sam Katz to operate the World Basketball League and National Basketball League’s Winnipeg Thunder in the early 1990s, said his organization will be fine-tuning its approach for the club’s next home game on June 12.

“Everybody who works for the Sea Bears, including me, we’re very dialed in and paying attention to what the fan experience was and we want to be very mindful of that. If we’re getting something wrong, we want to know about that…,” said Asper.

“For example, some people didn’t like the music, or the fact that it was playing all the time. So, if you noticed, we changed that on the fly… actually, it resulted in way more fan engagement. And the crowd started chanting, ‘Defence, defence.’”

The task of filling the league’s largest arena could suit the Sea Bears well in the long term.

“Winnipeg is unique for several reasons,” said Morreale. “Venue is obviously one of them… I think history plays into it in Winnipeg a lot. There’s a lot of people that have missed pro basketball in Winnipeg, and are really excited and you see it now with those fans who are young teens, etc., or parents with young teens or young kids. It’s almost like their opportunity to say, ‘We don’t want to lose this one. We want to keep this team around and we’re going to support it.’ ”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14