Mike Leslie wanted to finalize the Halifax Hurricanes’ opening-day roster as quickly as possible.
“The quicker we can get into a smaller group the better,” the Hurricanes president and general manager said in an interview during the team’s training camp last week at the Zatzman Sportsplex in Dartmouth.
When the Hurricanes open their 2019-20 NBL Canada regular season on Saturday on the road against the Island Storm, there will be a handful of familiar faces who will show the newcomers the ropes in the National Basketball League of Canada.
Hurricanes mainstay Cliff Clinkscales is 35 years old now and is calling this season his "last dance" and Antoine Mason, Ta'Quan Zimmerman and Joel Kindred are all back for another tour.
"This roster has a good mix of vets and players that are hungry to prove themselves."
- Hurricanes head coach Ryan Marchand
“We were looking for veteran players who had either played in our league or knew our league well or had experience playing overseas,” Leslie said. “That mix and a higher basketball IQ lends itself to an easier task of building a team with all of those combinations put together.”
Seven-footer Ashaun Dixon-Tatum comes aboard after five seasons in the NBA-G League and locals Chris Johnson (North Preston) and Tyler Scott (Halifax) give the team some Nova Scotia content. Former Acadia Axemen player Kyle Arsenault also has a local connection, as well as NBLC experience with the K.W. Titans and P.E.I. Storm.
“This roster has a good mix of vets and players that are hungry to prove themselves,” new head coach Ryan Marchand said in a news release. “We have a very high quality of talent and the amount of consistent and disciplined work that we put in will determine how high our ceiling can be.”
Rounding out the 11-man roster are guard Devin Sibley (Knoxville, Tennessee) and power forwards Tremayne Johnson (Los Angeles) and Marvell Waithe (Scarborough, Ont.).
“It was a very difficult decision,” Leslie said of finalizing the roster out of training camp. “It’s a fine line sometimes between two players. It comes down to an accumulation of little things and that’s usually how the decision is made.
“Every player that we have brought into camp did exactly what we thought they could do when we were recruiting and trying to identify players. There were a couple of surprises with a couple players that ended up doing a little bit more than we thought. And that’s always a bonus.”
Leslie wants a quicker start out of the gate this coming season and perhaps a more-experienced lineup would attain that.
The 2018-19 season started in mid-November and the Hurricanes struggled early on. When the calendar flipped to December, they lost four in a row. On Dec. 28 of last year, Halifax was floundering at 6-8 and could only manage a .500 record (12-12) by the end of January.
Undaunted, the Hurricanes pulled off winning streaks of seven in a row and six straight to close out the regular season and finished at 25-15. They pushed the eventual league champion Moncton Magic to the full seven games in the Atlantic Division final.
But for a team that had played in the previous three league championship finals, the season was considered a letdown.
“We were relatively inexperienced at a number of positions last year particularly early into the season,” Leslie recalled.
“It took us some time to find that rhythm and find that balance. This group seems to be a more well-rounded team than perhaps we were last year, both in terms of style of play and the type of players that we had.
“We wanted guys who could do many different things. Sometimes last year we had guys who could do one thing very well. But the game is an athletic game; it’s a fast-paced game which trends toward players who can do multiple things. That maybe is the biggest difference between last year and this year.”
The Hurricanes' first home game of the year is on Sunday afternoon against the St. John's Edge.
