2026 Scarborough Shooting Stars
122 · 2026-06-09 · medium
It's a small crossover percentage, but I'm fully aware that there are indeed some Oceanic Pleasenjoyers out there in the TMM audience. Our big birthday is coming up soon! So we've finally updated the website for our 110 bpm indie pop internet radio station, and there might even be some brand new t-shirts by the official third anniversary on July 1. Back during "Barbenheimer" summer, a nationwide celebration for both Janus-heads of the American empire – disposable plastic and mass death – neither of us had any idea that TMM would eventually wind up as The Oceanic dot fm's side project. The station's general manager, who also happens to be the inventor of Shirtdoku, laid down two laws early on: a.) no instrumental tracks, and b.) no rappers. Over the years, the second rule has been relaxed to account for the thin line between hip-hop and R&B – no, he's carrying a tune, that's singing! – and for K-Pop girlgroups that employ a "rapper" for song bridges, because come on that's just adorkable. Anyway, basketball. "No rappers" is a clear indication that your professional hoop league takes itself seriously, and that the fans should too. When folks tell me they've read Zero Season and I ask them what their favorite chapter was, they almost always say that it was the one where Master P suits up in the air-quotes ABA with a 50-year-old Jellybean Bryant. Fifteen years later, the Canadian Elite Basketball League split off from the "shoestring" NBL, their words, and created its own six-team summer product: a "party wrapped around a basketball game." Adopting the Elam Ending should have been enough of an indication that this new league was a joke, but in 2022 an expansion franchise in Scarborough (a/k/a East Toronto) signed a 6-3 guard named Jermaine Cole from St. John's University. The press release didn't bother to mention that he was a callback walk-on who never played a minute. The artist f/k/a Therapist has always had five-star concepts and three-star execution, and he's been trying to crack a roster since the 2013 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game. His four appearances with the Shooting Stars (2.4 ppg, 0.6 rpg) weren't his first pro paycheck; in 2021, he played twice for the Kigali Patriots in the new Basketball Africa League. It works like this: if your league sucks ass and needs attention, hire J. Cole. (The BAL did get a SLAM cover out of it.) Ever since the pandemic, the Chinese Basketball Association has failed to generate a homegrown star and domestic interest has cratered, because The Fall-Off is inevitable. So in April 2026, the Nanjing Monkey Kings brought him on for one game, he had an assist and a rebound, and NBA Instagram went nuts because "the culture" or something. This sideline story has a happy ending: since the CEBL's J. Cole stunt, it's grown from playground nonsense into the best pro basketball league in Canada. There are highlights on YouTube, but the season pass is worth paying ten bucks for. Scarborough is 5-1, second in the Eastern Conference behind the Brampton Honey Badgers, and leading the league in all defensive categories. I'd argue that the CEBL is more useful than the NBA Summer League for G Leaguers and internationals in their mid-20s who need second chances, so that's who's playing there now. No rappers.