Johannesburg-based team Made By Ball (MBB) will go to the Basketball Africa League (BAL) with 1986 NBA champion Sam Vincent as head coach, the club confirmed to ESPN.
Vincent was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1985 and won the NBA championship as a reserve in his first season. He went on to play for the Seattle SuperSonics, Chicago Bulls and Orlando Magic.
He coached the South African men's national team to ninth place at the 2003 FIBA Africa Championship - their joint-best ever showing at AfroBasket. Vincent has also coached the Nigeria men's and women's national teams, and was assistant coach at the Dallas Mavericks in 2006/7, and Charlotte Bobcats after that.
The BAL has yet to publicly announce MBB's participation. However, MBB club owner Cyril Shabalala, a former South African national team player who coached the club to the national championship, has confirmed they were handed a wild card spot despite failing to progress through Road to BAL qualifiers.
Vincent said in a video supplied to ESPN by MBB: "I'm so excited to reconnect with South African basketball as the head coach as MBB for the BAL championship.
"Basketball has grown so much in South Africa since the last time I was there. The players are better; the coaches are better. Of course, there's an amazing opportunity now with the BAL to showcase all this amazing talent."
South Africa's capital Pretoria will host the playoffs for the first time, from June 6-14, and Vincent's first task is to secure a ticket there through a four-team conference. The top two teams in each of the three conferences qualify for the playoffs, along with the two best third-placed teams.
Last season, the Cape Town Tigers became the first South African team to make the semi-finals, but failed to put a team together to defend their national title amid infighting and allegations of financial misconduct.
There was uncertainty regarding whether or not MBB would be handed an automatic spot in the BAL after they won the national championship in Tigers' absence. However, they were asked to play qualifiers in Kenya at short notice. Despite failing to qualify, they appear to have put in a strong enough showing to prove themselves worthy of BAL participation.
Counting on the element of surprise to act in MBB's favour, Shabalala intends to allow Vincent to sign his own trusted players to supplement the local core Shabalala had already built, which features former Cape Town Tigers captain Lebesa Selepe and national team veteran Neo Mothiba.
Shabalala told ESPN: "Sam Vincent is very seasoned. He played in the NBA, coached in the NBA, coached the national team when I was playing in the national team. It's great for us to identify him and he's obviously lived in this country. His kids are South African.
"He (Vincent) will be the one calling the shots from a coaching perspective. Myself and Lindo [Sibankulu] will just take the assistant coaching positions and take a step back.
"My role is just going to be stakeholder relations as well as the owner of the club, just to make sure we position ourselves nicely from that perspective going forward."
The BAL will tip off in Rabat, Morocco, on April 5 until April 13. Further conferences will follow in Dakar, Senegal (April 26 - May 4) and Kigali, Rwanda (May 17-25).