Mikh McKinney will never forget the heartbreak of last season’s ASEAN Basketball League.
The 6-foot-1 floor general and his Chong Son Kung Fu were highly expected to make it all the way into the ABL Finals, as they finished the eliminations as the top-seeded team. The achievement merited them an automatic semis appearance.
Unfortunately, fate had other plans. The then-neophyte Chinese ball club fell at the hands of Thailand’s winningest franchise Mono Vampire BC, and in the most painful way, Chongson were swept in the best-of-three series.
Now, McKinney has returned to the regional pro league to write his own redemption tour. But this time, nearly everything is different.
Last August, the Chong Son franchise decided to relocate from Nanhai to the brightly-lit city of Macau, and they will now be called the Macau Black Bears, the first Macanese pro basketball team in the nine-year-old league.
So for the Filipino-American guard, this is some sort of a fresh start, but still with the same goal.
“We know the formula. We know how to win,” the 26-year-old McKinney told Tiebreaker Times. “We also know that if we don’t do what we gotta do, we’ll come up short like we did last year, so I think we still got something to prove.”
However, it will not be all about redeeming themselves. For the Black Bears, their entry into the ABL means more than joining the league – it’s also about being able to enrich the basketball landscape in the peninsula.
“We’re excited to get going in Macau and start a new culture, with us being the first professional team out here,” said McKinney, who is entering his second year in the ABL. “We’re gonna start something new here in Macau.
“We plan on putting on a show for them out there.”
