Butch Carter was the first coach to turn the Toronto Raptors into a winner, and maybe he can do the same thing with the Canadian Basketball League.

Carter has been in Hamilton for the past couple of days for meetings with Mohawk College and a group of community basketball leaders in hopes that Hamilton will be one of the three, or perhaps four, inaugural members of the CBL, which will start operations on Dec. 1

Waterloo was confirmed as the first official franchise in the league on Monday, Ottawa is in and Carter is talking as if Hamilton will be ready to go to. There is also interest in Scarborough, and Carter said Wednesday that he had a group in Vancouver wanting to sign a letter of intent to join the league. However, the league will not have a western division, for at least the first year.

"Hamilton has always been a hotbed for basketball," Carter told The Spectator. "All the good stuff Mac has done, the minor basketball, they've produced a lot of basketball players on both the public and separate school side of it.

"You obviously have a market for basketball there."

The idea is to grow a domestic league which plays by the rules, scheduling and standards of FIBA (the world umbrella group for basketball) and which will have a Canadian-American ratio based on that employed by the Canadian Football League. That could help provide players for the Canadian men's national team, without the nationals having to work around the NBA schedule.

Teams would have a 10-player roster with, in the first year, at least four having Canadian citizenship.

Carter is president of the CBL, and individual teams are likely to be run by community groups, such as those that steer the CFL's Saskatchewan Roughriders, Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Edmonton Eskimos.

No prospective members of a Hamilton community group have been formally identified but Carter said that a number of local amateur basketball leaders have been at meetings in the city.

While media reports have referred to the CBL as semi-professional, Carter says, "There's no such thing as semi-professional: just ask the NCAA. This is professional."

Each team would work under a season-long salary cap of between $125,000 to $175,000, depending upon the number of games.

"We'd like to play 40 games, but it might be 28 the first year," said Carter, who coached the Raptors from 1997-2000, helped them into their first playoff berth in 2000, and is credited with the early development of stars Vince Carter and Tracy McGrady.

Carter hopes that there will be four teams this year, with the league eventually expanding to a dozen in two divisions.

The league's Canadian players will be graduates of basketball programs in Canada or the NCAA (where 250 Canadians play), or good amateur players who didn't qualify for college or university.

The last professional team in Hamilton was the Skyhawks, who played in the height-restricted (6-foot-7 maximum) World Basketball League in the summer of 1992, which was prior to the Raptors' arrival in Toronto.

The league folded after 34 games that summer but Hamilton was successful, drawing 14,000 to its first game and averaging 7,500 fans on Friday nights at Copps Coliseum, according to Ron Foxcroft, the former NCAA basketball official who was the Hawks' managing director. Foxcroft wasn't with the team when it joined the new National Basketball League in 1993, then moved to Edmonton prior to the playoffs.

"It'll be tough but I wish (Carter) well," said Foxcroft. "It's great that he wants to showcase Canadian talent, and Canadian officials.

"You need a good organization, you need good ownership, you need good coaches, you need good players and you need good officials."

Mohawk officials could not comment in detail on Wednesday as no agreement has been signed but did confirm that the college has been in negotiations with Carter for use of the David Braley Athletic and Recreation Centre at its Fennell Campus.

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Carter said the CBL teams in Waterloo and Hamilton would work around the schedule of major junior hockey teams in the two cities, in order to avoid conflicting dates.

He wants to use a smaller gym instead of, say, McMaster or even FirstOntario Centre, in order to keep costs down and also to create a better crowd atmosphere. He's hoping to average about 1,000 fans per game.

"And the reality is we want to do it all in one building, so you can practice and play there," he said.