- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Anyone who has an interest in basketball in Australia looks back wistfully at the time in the early 1990s when the sport was at its peak.
It has become almost a cliche to reflect on the days when the NBL enjoyed prime time television, back page articles and sold out stadiums.
Basketball fans who are honest with themselves accept that those days will almost certainly never be seen again in this country.
But what is a realistic aim? And how has the league fallen so far that in the past week most accepted the speculation that it was actually going to be shelved this season?
That didn’t eventuate, but what is slated is a seven-team competition which fans in the country’s three most populated cities – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – won’t have an interest in because they are unlikely to have a team.
The league is trying to hastily pull together a Victorian side in an attempt to retain fans in the sport’s Australian heartland, but that in itself is a concern due to the extremely short amount of time available to do so.
October has been slated for the new league to be launched, giving a possible new Victorian entrant a matter of months to determine the funding, players, staff, and all the other necessary components of a sports club.
The rest of the league will be made up of regional locales Townsville, Cairns, Wollongong and the Gold Coast, plus Adelaide, Perth and New Zealand.
It has the feel of a semi-professional second or third tier competition, rather than an elite national league.
The plan is then to add teams in Sydney and Brisbane next season, although there are no guarantees they will get off the ground.
The two most recognisable clubs in Australian basketball over the past two decades have been the Sydney Kings and Melbourne Tigers.
But most Australians would struggle to come up with the names of the Gold Coast and New Zealand franchises (the Blaze and the Breakers respectively).
The Tigers at least still exist, although they had so little faith in the structure of the new league they pulled out, while the Kings folded altogether.
What happened to the Kings just about sums up the troubles of the sport.
Sydney enjoyed full houses at the Entertainment Centre in the late 1980s and early 1990s, even though they usually struggled to even make the playoffs.
But, under a series of different owners, the team slid toward eventual oblivion amid some questionable decisions.
After the Kings finally won their first championship in 2003, for example, the owners expected the team to instantly become the hottest ticket in town.
So they drove up ticket prices, driving fans away in droves.
Disgraced businesman and former owner Tim Johnston then ensured the club folded as it was bankrolled by his failed Firepower company.
A generation of children discovered basketball 20 years ago when NBL players ran clinics and gave out free basketballs at primary schools.
But the league went away from that simple and highly effective marketing strategy.
It is something the new Basketball Australia hierarchy, led by former player and new chief executive Larry Sengstock, are trying to restore.
The league rarely put any money into marketing itself.
It was common year after year for people to react with surprise when they discovered the league was actually underway.
A large part of that is the fact they haven’t had a season launch or pre-season competition for years and they began the season proper in the middle of the AFL and NRL finals.
No-one seems to know when the league should even be staged. The jury still seems to be out on the switch to summer months which was undertaken some years ago.
Sengstock says he “has his own thoughts” on when the league should be held without going into details, but this year’s version will commence in October.
Despite all the sport’s troubles, there is no reason why basketball can’t again be a relevant part of the landscape.
Sengstock is handling himself well in an extremely difficult position and seems up for the challenge and is a basketball person, rather than just a businessman.
In recent years the product on the court has been of an extremely high quality.
Unfortunately, precious few people were aware of that and it will now take time to rediscover that level.
The league desperately needs stability, with the same teams year after year that become recognised by fans, rather than the constant chopping and changing of years gone by.
That is something BA are trying to implement.
It needs a strong presence in the country’s major cities, which is not easy to achieve, especially in Sydney.
And it needs to again win over the fans who are still out there and convince them to once again invest their time and money into what remains an exciting, family-friendly sport.
Build your own ultimate team! Pick your key players and take a shot at big cash prizes every day with Draftstars. For great odds on NBA games every day head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.