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It took just seven days for the NBL to go from its disappointing but familiar worst to its captivating, roller-coaster best.
From a club in voluntary administration to scores tied with 1.2 seconds left.
From “how is the league still going?” to “how is the league still a secret?”
The New Zealand Breakers and Cairns Taipans are to thank for the latter scenario, with the two sides putting on another top notch grand final series, culminating in the thrilling final minute of Game 2 on Sunday.
Ekene Ibekwe’s buzzer beater for the Breakers showed the NBL certainly has the ability to produce great sporting moments.
But the week didn’t start out so perfectly. Once again a franchise found itself on the rocks and, as a result, once again the future of the league was brought into question.
The Wollongong Hawks went into voluntary administration last Monday, with the club needing to lock in new sponsors this month if they are to continue on next season.
The announcement came as fans were still recovering from the left-field decision to declare Brian Conklin this season’s MVP on a Saturday night, at 11pm, through Twitter, without advance warning.
Now Conklin’s club, the Townsville Crocodiles, have joined the Hawks in voluntary administration.
Here we go again. Back to another low point.
Sunday’s game showed the potential. But the fact we had yet another week like the one that preceded it, combined with the devastating news out of Townsville yesterday, shows change is still needed.
More importantly, it shows that despite all the tweaks over the years, there’s a certain problem with the product that isn’t being acknowledged.
It’s 2015 and we’re still talking about a club folding. Why? How? There just has to be more at play here.
A while back, after getting a bit sick of all the theories about the league’s fall from grace, I looked into articles from the late 1980s onward that could help pinpoint exactly what went wrong to set the league on that famous downward path. I’ve posted samples of what I found most interesting here.
The basic take away? The NBL’s woes have been misdiagnosed.
In fact, there seems to be one factor that stands above all others when explaining what went wrong – the acceptance of which provides the first step towards truly fixing things now.
What a great business model… for 1989
To elaborate, let’s start with how a BRW article described the NBL business model in 1989:
The money, which is generated by sponsorships, ticket sales, merchandising and the sale of TV rights, is handed to the league’s 13 clubs, which spend it on players’ salaries, operating costs, stadiums, children’s basketball and so on. Sponsorships generate the most income.
Pay attention to that. Sponsorships, ticket sales, merchandising and then, last and seemingly least, TV rights.
For a sports league in the late 1980s, it was the dream business model. The envy of other codes. But the sports industry has shifted dramatically since then.
Today, if you’re a serious player, you do not list TV at the end of your list of revenue streams. Rather, your influence, audience and financial base is built on TV dollars. For the serious player, TV rights dwarf sponsorship, ticket sales, merchandise, all of them – combined.
(No, really. In the 2013 AFL Annual Report, revenue from broadcasting and AFL Media was listed as $234 million, while revenue from commercial operations – encompassing all of the other categories, among other earners like events – totalled $168 million.)
As TV rights became more and more important to the success or otherwise of a sports league in Australia, the NBL’s lack of them in any substantial sense slowly eroded the league’s position.
Which evokes the pretty basic question of why weren’t the NBL aboard the TV rights gravy train?
The answer to that provides one key insight that should change the way we look at the league and its constant periods of crisis. The answer, the one factor that stands above all others, the first step towards fixing things, is straightforward.
The painful truth
The NBL has never – at any point in its existence – truly worked as a TV product.
There. It’s been said. Say it out loud yourself, it actually feels good. It’s liberating.
The NBL has never – at any point in its existence – truly worked as a TV product.
For all the theories about the NBL’s fall from grace, not a single one of them paints a picture as stark as reading through articles about the NBL’s struggles with television. Seriously, read through them.
Starting with the 1992 season, Channel Ten committed to showing games live in primetime in each of the capital cities. That plan was abandoned mid-way through the ’92 season after poor ratings.
In August 1993, on the same weekend AFL games were reaching 35 per cent of households in Melbourne, NBL games were struggling to attract more than 2 per cent of households.
By 1995 there were experiments with chopping down the broadcast length from two hours to one and American commentators were flown over to teach locals on “the finer points of match description and presentation”.
By 1996 even the hitherto popular Perth Wildcats started to lose live coverage as games were shifted to after midnight, and the murmurings of summer being a better season option – with bigger TV rights cited as the main drawcard – were under way.
Ten pulled the plug on the NBL in 1997.
“We have no interest,” manager of network sport Michael Audcent said at the time. “We’ve done it for six years. Let someone else have a crack at it. Ratings-wise, it didn’t work.”
Asked if it would ever work, he said: “Not as a primetime sport… grand finals might work, but how many grand finals can you have?”
To be fair, it wasn’t all doom and gloom.
“Actually,” read a 1999 article in the West Australian, “the NBL returned some pleasant ratings surprises for Ten, but not in the markets that matter, Sydney and Melbourne.”
So the reality is Perth rated and Adelaide rated. But when it came to Sydney and Melbourne, the markets that ultimately determine your position commercially, even at its peak the game found it impossible to muster ‘double digits’ – 10 per cent of households – in the ratings, grand finals aside.
Now what?
The most important thing for the NBL community to do right now is accept, as gospel, that the NBL has never – at any point in its existence – truly worked as a TV product.
Yes, it was successful as a TV product in some markets. Yes, it was successful as a TV product during grand finals. And yes, it had the sponsors and the crowds and the merchandise and all the other things that make people yearn for the past.
But getting it right on TV in at least one of the nation’s two biggest markets is everything.
The NBL didn’t have that. The NBL doesn’t have that. The NBL doesn’t appear to be on a path towards having that in the future.
It’s that simple.
The implications are simple, too. Once you accept the NBL has never truly worked as a TV product, there’s really only two options.
Option A: If the league has visions of a future grander than where it is today, then it must take a sledgehammer to the TV issue. It must re-craft itself around TV. It must find the model that makes basketball irresistible as a TV-watching proposition.
There’s one out there – surely there has to be – it just needs to be found. The tricky part is having the courage to go looking.
Option B: If the league is more interested in accepting its limitations with TV than fighting them, then it needs to forget about mixing it with the big boys and work out what a sustainable structure looks like.
It’s easier. The risk is low. But there has to be adjustments to account for the fact more revenue is needed from somewhere if the likes of Wollongong and Townsville are going to evolve from their current year-to-year existence.
That’s it. These are the two options right now. There should be nothing else.
The ball is in the NBL’s court
When Fraser Neill left the CEO post mid-season, he departed with a vision that absolutely took a sledgehammer to the TV issue. He wanted to build the league around TV by turning it into a nightly product. To make the NBL routine viewing at home and a constant live content filler at TV network offices.
Whether his overall vision was the right way to go about it or not, you have to at least appreciate that he was going after that single biggest issue attached to the NBL’s very core.
Instead, the current administration is more status quo minded and that’s absolutely fine as an approach too – provided there aren’t any delusions as to what the product is or isn’t.
What’s concerning is I’m not convinced the current administration is that self-aware.
In fact, it feels like the NBL has been putting all its eggs in the ‘next TV deal’ basket, so much so that it neglected the current season. Hence the budget being cut to the point the league MVP was announced on Twitter just shy of midnight.
Of course, as I’ve been saying for years, the league’s audience has been growing fairly consistently under the just-expired TV deal. It was, for all its faults, a really good platform for growth. But that’s not to say that even after that neat trajectory of growth the NBL is at a point where it actually ‘works’ as a TV product.
If it worked, Game 1 of the grand final series wouldn’t be shown delayed around the country and Game 2 delayed in Perth and Adelaide. If Ten saw there was a business case for those broadcasts – the pinnacles of the NBL season – to be live, it would have done it. Plain and simple. It didn’t do it.
And that makes the expectations of an improved TV deal from next season smell a little off to me. It feels like the NBL doesn’t want to change for TV – given the rejection of the Fraser Neill model – but the league is expecting that somehow TV will change for it.
At any rate, it’s obvious that one small change in mindset needs to happen. The NBL, quite simply, needs to accept.
The NBL has not – at any point in its existence – truly worked as a TV product.
Whatever they do after accepting this is up to them. As long as its acknowledged. The league won’t prosper by pretending this isn’t a real thing.
In fact, it’s only going to put clubs more at risk of the situation Wollongong have found themselves in – searching for revenue that they aren’t getting from the league signing a big TV deal.
It’s only going to make potential investors even more hesitant than they have been throughout the preposterously drawn-out saga to return a team to Brisbane.
Repeat after me.
The NBL has not – at any point in its existence – truly worked as a TV product.