‘We’ve got so much great Canadian talent that’s coming up’

As the Canadian Elite Basketball League drives through the final week of its seventh season, commissioner and co-founder Mike Morreale has been pulled in every direction and peppered with questions about the hot-button topics that surround the country’s largest professional sports league.

It’s all a part of the gig, and a testament to how far the CEBL has come in a short time and where it appears to be going.

“It’s important that — my belief anyway — is the commissioner needs to be seen. The players got to know that I got their back, so do the owners, so do the coaches, and so does the public,” Morreale told the Free Press following his annual commissioner’s luncheon at the RBC Convention Centre on Friday.

The boss is happy to talk shop as Championship Weekend festivities flood downtown Winnipeg, which hosts the biggest week in Canadian basketball in the third season since the Sea Bears joined the league.

“Winnipeg has just been such a great market that I’ll go the extra distance,” added Morreale, who is no stranger to Winnipeg’s fan base from his time as a player for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Toronto Argonauts. “It’s wearing me down, but that’s okay.”

Hosting the big weekend in the provincial capital has proved to be a risk worth taking for CEBL. Although he was optimistic about Winnipeg’s market and where the league was headed at the time, Morreale didn’t know what the future held when Sea Bears owner David Asper put pen to paper.

“Sometimes you get lucky,” he said. “It’s true, when we were signing the agreements to have a team in Winnipeg, we put in those agreements that we were going to host a championship weekend here.

“That was a risk. We didn’t even know if we were going to continue to have championship weekends. We didn’t know what the format would be. We didn’t know what the response would be in this community, but it’s been mind-blowing. Sometimes you do all of those little things right and it kind of works in your favour.”

The Sea Bears have continued to smash attendance records in their third year, setting a new all-time single-season mark (92,103) for the CEBL, surpassing its own record of 86,275 that was set last year and becoming the first franchise to eclipse the 90,000 mark in league history.

“What’s most important about it is we’re going to leave here, and we’re going to be able to capture so many amazing things and be able to repurpose them to show people what it’s all about,” he said.

There are a lot of things Morreale is pleased about when it comes to his league, but there’s always room for improvement. One place to start is the league’s playoff format, which could see changes sooner than later.

The current format has been a pain point for some fans and teams since being introduced four years ago, owing to the host team receiving an automatic berth to the conference final. A host team has yet to win the league championship, and no hosting squad has posted a winning record in the regular season, including the Sea Bears, who went 11-13 this year.

“There’s a lot of good to it in terms of the auxiliary stuff, the festival component. There’s stuff that maybe doesn’t make sense anymore, because we’ve grown to the point where we don’t have to rely on the host team to give us a buffer,” Morreale said. “Everything is on the table, from traditional playoffs to best-of series. If we do go that direction, how do we replace this, all the extra?”

“We’ve come to the point where I’m not going to say we’ve outgrown it, but we’ve matured enough where we can actually look at different things,” he added. “I would say, if you’re a betting man, we’re probably going to be doing different things, because we’re at the point that we should and we could, and I just hope that we maintain some of this festivalness to what we’re doing.”

Long term, Morreale hopes for more purpose-built venues for teams, but that’s not the top priority. Most importantly, to Morreale, is that the process of finding private owners for all of the franchises in the 10-team league is almost complete.

“That’s a big game-changer,” he said.

The only franchises that remain under the ownership of CEBL co-founder Richard Petko are the Ottawa BlackJacks, Saskatchewan Rattlers and Niagara River Lions, but that is set to change again shortly.

Morreale revealed that the league will announce the privatization of another franchise in the first week of September.

From there, it’s about growing the league. Expansion has been a talking point within league offices, and Morreale said he’s more confident about adding more teams than he was a few years ago.

“I think you’ll see a lot of interest. We’ve received a lot of interest,” he said.

“If it’s as quick as 2026, there’s a possibility, but I think we’re starting to see now the path to growing our league again. The beauty is we’ve got so many players that want to be a part of it, we’ve got so much great Canadian talent that’s coming up, that it doesn’t scare you from a dilution point of view.”

Not all has been rosy. Some smaller things need to be ironed out in-season, including the officiating, which was put under the spotlight recently.

In last week’s Western Conference semifinal between the Calgary Surge and Vancouver Bandits, a rare sequence transpired where three straight fouls called on the Surge in Target Score Time were reversed after review.

In each instance, the Bandits would’ve had an opportunity to win the game on a pair of free throws. Instead, Calgary won the contest from the charity stripe after Vancouver was called on a shooting foul.

It’s the league’s policy that any potential game-deciding fouls are subject to review, but that didn’t soften the intense scrutiny that followed in the days after the game, as the Bandits felt a trip to Championship Weekend was taken from them.

Morreale noted that the sequence of events, although correctly officiated, was a learning opportunity to improve communication, and that the league will work to be better prepared for it in the future.

“There’s certainly internal communication that everyone knows,” he said. “Maybe what we failed to do properly, only because we didn’t expect that type of series of events — we plan for a lot but I didn’t expect that — so I think the communication is big.”

Despite that blip, Morreale remains confident about his league.

Entering 2025, the CEBL had seen attendance growth for three years in a row and an 89 per cent year-over-year increase in overall attendance since 2022. Meanwhile, viewership was also on the rise with a 97 per cent increase on TSN since 2022, and 9.6 million social media video views garnered in 2024.

Morreale said those numbers are all up again in 2025, though they haven’t been made public yet.

“We have done a really good job,” he said. “We are doing well. You don’t want to take your foot off the gas; there’s a ton of stuff we got to do, but I think it gives you the hope that the future is bright.”

joshua.frey-sam@freepress.mb.ca

X: @jfreysam