The National Basketball League of Canada currently has two tight geographical groupings. Here they are with the population of each municipality in brackets followed by the seating capacities of the facilities in which they play:
ATLANTIC DIVISION
Cape Breton (Sydney 29,904) Highlanders (5000)
Halifax (316,701) Hurricanes (11,093)
Island (Charlottetown 44,739) Storm (4000)
Moncton (71,889) Miracles (6554)
Saint John (67,575) Riptide (6603)
Geographically these five teams are all tightly grouped in the three Maritime provinces.
CENTRAL DIVISION
Kitchener-Waterloo (338,208) Titans (7312)
London (383,822) Lightning (9046)
Niagara (St. Catharines 133,113) River Lions (5300)
Orangeville (30,729) A's
Windsor (217,188) Express (6500)
These five teams are all tightly grouped in Southwestern Ontario. The tight geographical groupings are of course great for keeping travel and its costs down.
Orangeville was previously based in Brampton whose population is 577,000. Brampton though is really just a suburb of Toronto and doesn't have much of a civic identity of its own. The basketball fan base in Brampton is therefore fixated on the Toronto Raptors and the A's were unable to carve out their own niche.
While the level of competition is very decent, team payrolls are very low. NBL of Canada teams operate with a salary cap of $150,000. That works out to an average of $12,500 a season per player, but veterans generally earn a larger wage of as much as $4,500 a month or $27,000 over the course of the six-month season.
Therefore I doubt that the London Lightning would even make the playoffs in the Spanish ACB. In fact I'm not even sure the Lightning would make the playoffs in the Lithuanian LKL.
