When the NBA released its schedule for international pre-season games, Australia again missed out.
The chance for the NBA to play games in Australia has been talked about for years but has never got off the ground. The closest Australia has come to was the canceled All-Star tour during the last NBA lockout.
The potential earnings of an NBA game being held on our shores is huge with Australia having the largest number of NBA league pass subscribers outside of the United States and the league itself maybe the most popular overseas sporting league, with stars such as LeBron James and Kobe Bryant being just as well known amongst today’s youth as local stars like Lance Franklin, Michael Clarke and Billy Slater.
Merchandise such as jerseys are selling in record numbers and the NBA is even considering starting a local version of NBA TV. But perhaps the biggest group that could gain from the NBA coming to Australia would be Basketball Australia.
Despite a strong showing by the Boomers at the London Olympics, the domestic league, the National Basketball League (NBL), is struggling to regain public acceptance.
Gone are the heydays of the NBL in the late ’80s to the late ’90s, when players such as Andrew Gaze, Shane Heal and Lanard Copeland helped the NBL hold its own during the winter months, where it competed against the monoliths of the AFL and the NSWRL/ARL/NRL.
After the move to the summer months during the 1998-99 season, the league plummeted during the next decade with the low point coming in 2008 and 2009 when the league lost former powerhouse, the Sydney Kings, a founding member of the NBL, the Brisbane Bullets, the troubled Singapore Slingers, and the premiers of that season, South Dragons.
The league had no free-to-air presence and virtually had no media coverage.
Now the league has regained some of the lost ground with the Sydney Kings returning and having a strong free-to-air presence on Network Ten, but it still lags behind where it used to be in the public eye.
If you went into any playground or workplace in the country and ask someone to name five players in the NBL, you would be lucky to get one name from most. The league lacks big names so it should use the name recognition of the NBA and its starts to boost the NBL.
A game such as NBL All-Stars versus, perhaps, the Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Bulls or the Miami Heat or even the Golden State Warriors with Australian star Andrew Bogut would create a huge publicity boost for the NBL and basketball in Australia.
It would also be perfectly placed as if played in September or early October, the NBL season would be kicking off, allowing new fans to catch a glimpse of the NBL’s stars and perhaps viewing games during the season as a result.
The opportunity for a big audience on free-to=air TV should be too big an opportunity for the NBL to pass up, possibly having a similar reaction to the 2007 football match between Sydney FC and the LA Galaxy with their mega-star David Beckham, which was the A-League’s first major free-to-air TV coverage and was successful in showing the league to new fans.
The match could help teams and the league gain financial footing and if held in a city like Brisbane, could lay the ground work for a NBL team there.
However, one stumbling block remains; the NBA itself. At the present time, David Stern and the league seem more interested in increasing the NBA’s presence in Europe and Asia than in Australia.
So, therefore, Basketball Australia and the NBL should be doing everything possible to get the NBA down under as the potential gain to the domestic scene is tremendous.
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