Saint John basketball team returning again, organizers hope for good

The Port City Power basketball team is back in Saint John again, but will it last this time?

The team name was previously used by a franchise that folded before the start of the 2025 season, but is back again in a new iteration.

In an interview with Information Morning Saint John, David Magley, president of The Basketball League known as TBL, said the last version of the team folded because the facilities and business model needed to make more sense.

He said the TBL currently has 40 teams and is entering its eighth season. Port City Power will start playing games next month.

Magley said Saint John is a great market and pointed to basketball teams that have existed there in the past.

“When both the Riptide and the Mill Rats were there, I saw what the crowd looked like. The difficulty with that league, it was hard to sustain financially because the venues were so expensive to play in,” Magley said.

He said this time the team will try a different approach and pointed to Moncton's team as an example of what that will look like. Instead of playing at the Avenir Centre downtown, Moncton's team plays at Crandall University, which he said seats 600 and sells out every game. Eventually the team could move into the larger Avenir Centre after it builds a following, he said.

Similarly, the Saint John Power will play at the UNB Saint John campus instead of at TD Station like previous basketball teams have.

Magley said to play on ice, there’s almost a $5,000 or $6,000 cost each game to convert the venue, which he described as “significantly higher” than the average costs elsewhere in the league.

Basketball games can be played in smaller venues than hockey games, which he said usually need about 3,000 fans per game to be profitable.

“If we could average 400, 500 fans per game, we're going to make good money, break even. And it's a good business model.”

Magley said the team will keep the Saint John Power name because it was too late to start over with a new brand at this point.

“It wasn't an awful name. It was just a brand that we could transition,” he said.

While Magley highlighted the different venue, he said it will ultimately take more than that for the team to be successful. This time around the team will be owned by the league as it gets started, to get it off the ground before moving to private ownership later.

“The goal is to not be in the team ownership business, but with the other three teams being locally owned, we didn't want to wait,” Magely said. “We wanted to get a fourth team and make it work.”

“So you know, Saint John will be on the lips of everybody. We will have national sponsorships. We have a league-branded uniform.”

'It’s good for basketball'

Dustin Caissie is the team market owner for the Tri-City Tide, the league’s team for the Greater Moncton Area.

“It’s good for basketball,” Caissie said of gaining another team in the region.

“It's important that the youth can see that there are opportunities to continue basketball, you know, beyond university or beyond high school locally.”

Caissie said the league’s ownership of the team will be the difference to ensure that it moves forward this time. Start-up costs can be very intimidating to an owner when a team is getting started, so not having this worry resting on a private owner will help, he added.

“I think it's definitely something that will allow them to focus on growing the team, getting fans out and finding sponsors in the community,” Caissie said.

“The league won't let it fail. There are also locals involved that I've spoken to who I think have good intentions and will make this work.”

He said TBL’s model includes having several local players on the roster for teams, which Caissie said can help bring out fans.

“You don't start big and you slowly build your team and bring players who are loyal and build that team up from the bottom.”