2003-04 NBA G League Finals
Asheville Altitude def. Huntsville Flight, 1-0
2003-04 NBA G League Finals result: Asheville Altitude def. Huntsville Flight, 1-0.
Sourcing caveat: A Spanish-language Wikipedia season article named the runner-up as "Charleston Lowgators" (that year's actual runner-up was Huntsville Flight). A contemporary St. John's Athletics preview of the title game and APBR.org's independent retrospective both confirm Huntsville Flight as the opponent, which is what is recorded here.
Result
| Team | Result | |
|---|---|---|
| Champion | Asheville Altitude | 1-0 |
| Runner-up | Huntsville Flight |
The Finals shifted to a single winner-take-all championship game starting this season (through 2006-07). Asheville won 108-106 in overtime.
Games
| Game | Date | Result | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game 1 | April 24, 2004 | Asheville Altitude 108–106 Huntsville Flight | Asheville Civic Center, Asheville, North Carolina |
Finals context
The 2003-04 season brought the first major structural change to the NBDL's championship format: rather than a best-of-three series, the league moved to a single winner-take-all title game, a format that would hold for four seasons through 2006-07. Asheville, which had finished atop the regular-season standings at 28-18, hosted Huntsville for the inaugural single-game Finals on April 24, and the matchup carried a built-in storyline that made it easy to promote: Huntsville's floor leader, Erick Barkley, and Asheville forward Lavor Postell had been teammates at St. John's University years earlier, both drafted in the same 2000 NBA Draft (Barkley 28th overall by Portland, Postell 39th by the Knicks), and now found themselves on opposite benches fighting for a minor-league title. Barkley had been the driving force behind Huntsville's run to the championship game, exploding for 33 points in just 24 minutes in the semifinal round to push the Flight through. Asheville, though, prevailed on its home floor in a game that needed extra time to settle: the Altitude won 108-106 in overtime, one of two overtime championship games in the four-year run of the single-game format (the other coming in 2006-07). No Finals MVP was awarded, since the honor was still more than a decade away from being introduced, but Postell's presence on the winning side gave the St. John's rivalry its first chapter with an Asheville-favorable ending. This championship also carries a documented research wrinkle worth noting for anyone tracing the record: at least one Spanish-language secondary source has listed Asheville's 2003-04 opponent incorrectly as the "Charleston Lowgators," a name that actually belongs to the 2001-02 runner-up franchise. Contemporary reporting from the time -- including a same-day college-athletics preview of the Barkley-Postell matchup and an independent retrospective of the era -- both confirm Huntsville Flight, not any Lowgators franchise, as Asheville's actual 2003-04 opponent. For Asheville, the win was the first of what would become back-to-back titles, the only instance in G League/D-League/NBDL history of a team repeating as champion, with the second coming the very next season. The Altitude were among the league's original Southeastern launch franchises and, like most of their contemporaries in this era, operated as a standalone club with no single NBA parent team attached -- the modern one-affiliate-per-team model was still years away. Huntsville, denied a title despite Barkley's star turn, would fold from the league entirely within a couple of seasons, one of several early-2000s NBDL franchises that could not establish itself long-term in a small Southern market still getting acquainted with professional minor-league basketball.
Sources
Data last verified: 11 August 2026.
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