ABL Is Talking a Good Game

The American Basketball League will launch its third season next Thursday and its top executive says the women’s pro league has a stronger financial base.

Gary Cavalli, chief executive for the nine-team league, said recent infusions of money by “equity investors,” the sale of operating rights for three teams and rising sponsorship sales have put the ABL on track to break even financially in two years.

One investor reportedly invested $6.5 million but Cavalli would not confirm the figure nor identify the investor.

Whoever he or she is, it’s believed the investor asked last spring for “down to the bone” cost-cutting, one result of which was the dissolution of the Long Beach StingRays.

Also, league and team staffers were hit with 10% pay cuts, which remain in place.

But Cavalli made it sound in an 85-minute teleconference Wednesday that there are no big problems on the ABL horizon.

Season ticket sales are up, he said, 30% over last season, which were up 23% over Year 1. He said his goal this season is an average attendance of 5,500 to 6,000. Last year’s was 4,300, up from 3,500.

“Right now we think we will lose less than a million dollars next season, and after that we hope to break even two years from now,” he said.

Much of what was discussed Wednesday had to do with the exposure opportunity the ABL can realize with a prolonged NBA lockout.

“We’ve caught a break, it seems, with the NBA lockout, with the likelihood the NBA will go a month or two without playing,” Cavalli said. “We intend to exploit that as best we can.”

As for ABL players, Seattle Reign forward Kate Starbird, for one, seems confident there will be a full 1998-99 season.

“I’m absolutely confident we will finish this season,” she said Thursday.

“We’ve been told investors can keep us in business and that our job as players is to play great basketball and make it profitable for them.”

After last season, Starbird called a network TV deal “essential” for the league, and she repeated that Thursday.

“That will eventually be the tell-tale sign if we make it or not,” she said. “It’s not possible to be profitable without TV, because sponsorships and TV go hand-in-hand.”

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You’ll have to excuse one-time followers of the Long Beach StingRays if they ask Cavalli if present commitments to financial success are any stronger than those the ABL showed to its StingRay franchise.

The team was born on April 15, 1997, and was summarily disbanded on Aug. 26, 1998. In its one season, it missed winning the ABL championship by one game.

Home crowds were tiny, many numbering in the hundreds.

Those who’d bought season tickets and creditors were left holding the bag.

Cavalli said all season ticket holders would be reimbursed “this week.”

Presumably, that meant creditors too.

ABL Notes

Brian Agler, coach of the two-time ABL champion Columbus Quest, is reportedly interviewing for vacant WNBA jobs. Small wonder. Mainstay Quest forward Andrea Lloyd retired after last season and most valuable player Valerie Still blew out a knee recently and is out for the season. . . . The ABL TV carrier is Fox Sports Net, which is televising the Philadelphia-New England opener next Thursday. The 44-game regular-season schedule ends March 25.