Anchorage Northern Knights

The Anchorage Northern Knights were a professional basketball team based in Anchorage, Alaska from 1977 to 1982. The team played in the Eastern Basketball Association (EBA) during the 1977–78 season. The next season, the league changed its name to the Continental Basketball Association (CBA). The Northern Knights were their division champions two years in a row (1979–1980) and won the 1980 CBA Finals. Throughout their history, the Northern Knights played their home games at West Anchorage High School Gymnasium. History When the Northern Knights joined the league, then known as the Eastern Basketball Association (EBA), it attracted national attention for being perhaps the most misplaced franchise in the history of professional sports. Playing in Anchorage, Alaska, the team was 5,000 miles away from its nearest competitor, as all the other teams were based in the eastern Pennsylvania–New York–New Jersey area. League officials "began to see the publicity value a team in Alaska would have for the EBA, which, with an enlarged talent pool since the ABA folded, had been trying to upgrade its image from that of a nickel-and-dime Pennsylvania mill-town circuit—which is mostly what it had been—to something on the order of baseball's Triple-A leagues," John Papnek in Sports Illustrated. During the team's first two seasons, the Knights began their regular schedule with an extended homestand; then endured a mid-season bus trip to every CBA team in the league; then finished out the season with another homestand. The Northern Knights had the longest recorded road trip in professional sports history during the 1979–1980 season as the team traveled by bus around the contiguous United States—playing 16 games in 31 days. The Knights experienced success in the 1977–78 season, leading the league in attendance and often playing before sellout crowds. They won the Western Division with a 24–7 record in 1977-78. The team advanced to the CBA Finals the following year, where they were swept in four games by the Rochester Zeniths, with whom they had begun to develop an impassioned rivalry. In 1979-80, the Northern Knights captured the CBA Championship by defeating Rochester in seven games. It was the first professional sports championship won by an Alaskan team.