As the inaugural Canadian Elite Basketball League season wraps in Saskatoon Sunday and a champion is crowned, commissioner Mike Morreale already has lofty expansion plans for the future.

The championship weekend starts with two semifinal games on Saturday. The host Saskatchewan Rattlers play host to the second-seeded Edmonton Stingers. The second game features the fourth-ranked Hamilton Honey Badgers playing the league-leading Niagara River Lions. All games will be played at the Sasktel Centre in Saskatoon.

The winners of the semifinals play in the CEBL championship game on Sunday. Fans can watch all three contests live streamed on CBC Sports.

Morreale sat down with CBC Sports to reflect on the opening season and look ahead at what's to come for the CEBL.



CBC Sports: Championship weekend is here, so how are you feeling as you look back on your inaugural year?



Mike Morreale: Awesome. Tired. Excited. It's hard to believe we're at this point right now. At some point that feeling that overwhelms you will set in. I'm just so proud of what we've been able to do. This is all hands on deck. It takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of crazy. And here we are.



CBC: Would you call this first season a success?



MM: I look at this as an investment into the future of Canadian basketball. We all know what happened with Raptors and the celebrations. That was tremendous and will have a lasting effect. Many of our players in this league grew up during the Vince Carter era. That's what got them playing basketball. They are now living out their dreams finally at home at a time of year when they'd be hanging out or training during the summer. To see them getting excited and perform in front of the hometown fans is so encouraging. I would definitely call this first season a success."



CBC: Is there a moment that happened during the season where this all made sense to you?



MM: I know exactly the moment. It was game two, we had just left Saskatoon to go to Edmonton. It was the first game ever in Edmonton. If anything could go wrong, it did. I'm out on the court during timeouts with a suit on throwing balls into the stands and getting the crowd fired up. We had our challenges. The place was packed. It came down to a last-second shot to put it into overtime. That thrill and the noise and excitement, I turned to our VP and said this is lightning in a bottle. Even though the remainder of the year had its trials and tribulations, there have been so many moments like this. It's emotional. I get goosebumps thinking about it. I knew we had something in that moment. There's a ton of work to do and we're already planning for 2020 and we just have to get better.



CBC: There are going to be people out there probably expecting a league like this to fail. Why is the CEBL not going to fail?



MM: It's not going to fail because we've done this the right way, every step of the way. We've spent the time and we've done our research. We did what I think are all the right things. But you're right, the question I get more now is, 'Are you back for 2020?' And I'm like, absolutely. We have an owner in Richard Petko who's put his money into something that he believes in. It wasn't that he wanted to make money. That's not going to come immediately. It's about more to him than that. It's about a legacy of basketball in this country. When he said that and took away all of the things about money I knew this would work. It was about doing this the right way from staff to players.