ABL Reduces Staff Salaries, Is Late Meeting Its Payroll

Salary cutbacks and tardy paychecks have put the American Basketball League under close scrutiny.

Executives of the 2-year-old, 11-team league told league and team staffs recently that 10% salary reductions were in effect “temporarily.” Also, the ABL was two working days late on last month’s million-dollar-a-month payroll, but league officials called it a banking glitch.

“Eighty-five percent of our people are on direct payroll deposit and it was just a wire transfer problem, that their checks went to their banks on a Tuesday instead of the previous Friday,” Jim Weyermann, chief of operations at the league’s Palo Alto office, said Friday.

Gary Cavalli, chief executive of the league, was on vacation and unavailable, but Weyermann said the ABL’s players and coaches weren’t affected by the pay cutbacks.

“The pay rollback is temporary--three to five months,” Weyermann said. “This will free up marketing and advertising dollars for us. . . .There is no question that we will play a third season.”

Weyermann said some league officials had voluntarily taken deeper pay cuts and that Cavalli had taken “a substantial cut.”

Pam Batalis, ABL vice president for sales, said the pay rollback was “typical of any young, start-up company.”

Asked if she was certain the league could play a third season, she said:

“Oh my God, yes. The players and employees of this league have an exceptional commitment. If anything like that was going down, everybody would be aware of it.”

Said Long Beach StingRay guard Andrea Nagy, vacationing in Mississippi, “I didn’t know about any salary cut, but I’m not concerned. I’m confident we’ll have our season and that it’ll be a good one.”

The ABL began playing in the fall of 1996, the WNBA in the summer of ’97. Although the quality of basketball is rated nearly even by most basketball observers, generating financial resources has been a mismatch.

The WNBA had $21 million in major corporate sponsorship in the bank before it played its first game. The attendance disparity also is wide. The ABL averaged 4,333 last season. The WNBA is averaging just over 10,000 this season.