Champions Zamalek and AS Sale are among five teams returning to the BAL, with seven clubs making their debut this year across the two conferences.
Clubs from Angola, Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal, Rwanda and Morocco all booked their tickets as national champions, while the six others emerged through qualifiers.
Among the debutants are Cape Town Tigers, with owner Raphael Alexander Edwards saying their involvement next month will help the sport “take off” in South Africa.
South Africa is the only country to have hosted the NBA Africa Game, an exhibition match with NBA players which was staged in 2015, 2017 and 2018, but the reality is that cricket, football and rugby dominated the country’s traditional sporting landscape.
“I believe it’s going to happen because basketball is more of a lifestyle sport, more than any of these other sports, so it really connects to the streets, to culture, to pop culture,” the American told BBC Sport Africa.
“It is something great for South Africa, where there is a tonne of talent which hasn’t been recognised enough, and the Cape Town Tigers is putting the country back on the map.
“We’ve been less than a year in existence and we won the South African national championship. We have won the Southern region African championship and then we came through the qualifiers, so we have been competitive. Each time people have seen us, we have been better.”
The BAL is supported by the the International Basketball Federation (Fiba) and America’s National Basketball Association (NBA), with the latter heavily financing the operation.
“When it comes to operating and commercialising a professional sports league, we are blessed to be able to tap into all those resources and all that expertise,” Gallo Fall added.
“The partnership we have with Fiba is going to ensure that we are the permanent professional basketball league in Africa going to attract elite talent and retain elite talent from Africa.”
Meanwhile, the BAL has announced that one NBA Academy Africa prospect has joined each teams for the league’s 2022 season.
Players from six countries – Cameroon, Central African Republic, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan – who currently attend the NBA Academy Africa training centre in Saly, Senegal, have been assigned to or selected by BAL clubs.