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Liberty Ballers and local ballers team up for TBT

05/19/2015, 9:00am EDT
By Garrett Miley

Garrett Miley (@GWMiley)
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The Basketball Tournament made headlines a year ago in its inaugural season. The winner-take-all, single elimination tournament oozing with professional talent handed a $500,000 check to the Notre Dame Fighting Alumni after they defeated Team Barstool in the finals.

This season, TBT is back with even higher stakes.

Now with a $1 million prize on the line, a local blogger couldn’t resist entering the tournament and putting together a roster that could bring home the championship in a talented field.

Liberty Ballers editor Jake Pavorsky, a student at Temple, followed the inaugural TBT in 2014, but wanted to work on building a team in 2015 and put himself in the center of the action.

“I just followed from afar because I wasn’t able to go but I had friends who went and they were just telling me how great it was,” Pavorsky said. “I saw the outcome online, I saw that Notre Dame beat Team Barstool and I was intrigued that they were bringing it back and that they were upping the prize. It sort of hit me one day that I should enter a team and try and see if we could compete. turned to social media to start building his roster.”

Pavorsky turned to social media to build his team after exhausting his initial options for recruiting talent.

“It was tough,” Pavorsky said. “At first, I started reaching out to contacts that I had sort of made over the past couple years through the business. Some of them didn’t really pan out and I turned to Facebook and started messaging just about every player from the City of Philadelphia on Facebook that I could find. I messaged somewhere between 30 and 40 guys just sending them the same exact copy and pasted link about the team and who I am...None of them really panned out.”

With Pavorsky looking to put together a team, there was a Philadelphia basketball player with a roster in mind that had a shot at TBT’s prize.

Former Plymouth-Whitemarsh and Siena point guard Ronald Moore was in Caserta, Italy when he heard about TBT upping the stakes for their 2015 tournament. With a professional career of his own to worry about, he needed someone to take the reigns of the operation.   

“He was looking for a guy to sort of run a team from behind the scenes and work on getting the fan vote up so we could qualify,” Pavorsky said. “I talked to him and gave him out pitch and told him that Liberty Ballers would have no problem qualifying and that we would get a really high seed and he was all in. He had his team of seven or eight other guys and that was it. I brought them all on board and it’s looking really good right now.”

Moore now plays for Juvecaserta Basket in Italy. In addition to other Siena alumni on the roster, Liberty Ballers roster is chock-full of Philadelphia basketball names.

Chuck Moore, Ronald’s brother and coach of Coatesville High School, will coach Liberty Ballers. The Moore’s have also recruited former Temple point guard Ryan Brooks, former Saint Joseph’s shooting guard Garrett Williamson, as well as former Villanova forwards Reggie Redding and Antonio Pena.

Currently, each player on the roaster is slated to make just around $100,000 with Chuck Moore making $20,000 as the coach if the team brings home the championship.

As the team’s booster, Pavorsky would get $10,000 of the team’s winnings. Not too shabby for a college blogger.

“When I spoke to the guys it was sort of like ‘I need guys, tell me what you want,’” he said. “They said ‘Well, we all want 100 grand apiece and your cut is 10k.’ Obviously, it’s not a ton of money but I’m not greedy and the guys that we have here, I don’t think we could have put together a better team. Taking that cut was perfectly fine by me.”

Liberty Ballers, a SB Nation site, is owned by Michael Levin, while Pavorsky serves as the managing editor. The TBT team, however, is all Pavorsky.

“This is sort of my baby,” he said. “I put this thing together by myself and I was sort of leading the charge behind it. [Michael Levin] has been great about getting the fan votes and stuff like that, but I would say that this is basically my baby.

“Hopefully the fans will support us and support a basically all-Philly team and give us a top seed,” Pavorsky said.

The top 18 teams in fan voting qualify for the tournament, with the top eight seeds getting a very coveted by round in a single elimination tournament. The first round of fan voting runs until June 1, and the Liberty Ballers are currently sitting pretty in sixth place.

After June 1, voting will continue to remain open for the top-18 teams to determine the top eight seeds receiving the bye.

Philadelphia will host the Northeast Regionals Just 17-19 with the finals being held in New York and aired on ESPN on August 2.


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