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When Ken Cole recently suggested the NBL move back to winter, he joined a growing list of league identities advocating a shift towards the cooler months.
Andrew Gaze and players association president Jacob Holmes last year made separate calls for a January-starting league, then Cal Bruton said he wanted the season to “bang heads with the big boys” again.
Cole wrote a passionate online post to state his case.
“Our starting point is to switch seasons, allowing the cream of our talent to play in our NBL while still allowing them time to participate in a variety of international leagues to supplement their incomes,” he wrote.
“While difficult, the women seem to have been able to accomplish this task with Opals stand-outs playing in Australia, the USA and Europe all in one year.”
With the NBL where it is at the moment, this is a conversation that needs to take place.
The league has been growing at a steady pace in recent years and with a new ownership and CEO, there’s hope this growth will soon be accelerated.
It’s not like the NBL is close to folding, that’s for sure.
But the NBL is a long, long way from prominence. To many casual sports fans, it lacks any sort of presence at all.
The numbers back this up. The Big Bash League has shown itself capable of pulling national TV audiences of over one million this season. The NBL has an average metro audience that hovers around 40,000.
The only problem is that while ‘Summer v Winter’ does a good job of generating discussion, it’s an over-simplified debate.
There’s a wide number of potential NBL schedules – including some that feature both summer and winter months – and the real question is which one of that wide number is going to reap the most benefit.
This is no either/or proposition. It’s time to start digging deeper.
Constructing the perfect schedule requires looking through two lenses: the talent-minded lens, which analyses what best caters to quality players, and the fan-minded lens, which is about grabbing the attention of casual sports fans and the basketball fans that don’t currently engage with the NBL.
The talent-minded lens
Cole, Gaze, Holmes and Bruton all seem to look at the schedule through the talent-minded lens.
There’s a fair argument for them doing so – an improvement to the on-court product can be expected to boost off-court indicators too.
The key fact one must be aware of here is that basically every major basketball league in the world starts in October or November. Therefore, even a semi-radical change would put the NBL notably out of step.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Holmes pushed for a January-May league to take advantage of the international calendar.
Imports cut mid-season by European teams could be tempted by the offer of a full-season deal. The same applies to those holding out for an NBA deal that never comes, à la Jonny Flynn and Sam Young recently, who were both signed over a month into the NBL season.
The delayed start may, however, mean the league is less appealing to your James Ennis types – recent NBA draft picks looking for a higher-paying ‘gap year’ than the NBA’s minor league, the D-League.
What might best appeal to this group is a season that starts a bit earlier but wraps up by late November or December. This would allow them to join their NBA team’s D-League affiliate after their Australian stint.
From an import perspective, it’s hard to advocate pushing further along than a January start date.
In a straight winter season, the NBL would overlap both the end and start of international seasons – making it a difficult league to transfer in and out of – and it would also clash with NBA Summer League, training camps and pre-seasons.
Top imports are typically trying to get the attention of NBA scouts so that could be a deal-breaker, although there’s some chance D-League players looking for a higher-paying gig in the off-season might start looking our way.
The other guys we’d ideally like to recruit are those from the top tiers of Aussie talent.
For this, let’s run with Cole’s suggestion of having our overseas stars use the NBL as a second income.
The idea’s potential is restricted by the fact the seasons of top European clubs end around mid-June and start up again early October, leaving only a small window for the likes of Joe Ingles to come back for an NBL cameo.
That’s if there’s a window at all, which may not be the case in Olympic and World Cup years.
But who’s to say bringing home some big name players, if only for a two- or three-week stint, would not have its advantages?
Teams in the Big Bash don’t pass up Test players just because they can only manage one or two appearances. Quite the opposite – they use them to market the team, be interviewed in the team polo and sell memberships.
If the calendar passes through July or August, even though there’s a few obvious differences between the two sports, this model might just be replicable.
How contractually possible it is for these players to have ‘second teams’ is the question.
It’s difficult to conclude which schedule actually works best under the talent-minded lens, but what we’ve gone over so far gives you an idea of what helps and hinders.
The fan-minded lens
The other approach begins with looking at how potential schedules would clash with the more popular primetime sporting options in Australia.
The current schedule gives us an insight into the effect of competition.
For its first three months, October to December, the league tends to chug along nicely, as you can see with the TV ratings from the previous two seasons:
But then, the Big Bash comes along. The Australian Open starts. International cricket moves to primetime.
The A-League heads to finals. The NRL and AFL pre-seasons start to get interesting. The real NRL and AFL seasons begin.
From January onwards, the NBL cops hit after hit after hit, to the point where its showcase event – the Grand Final, which actually produces some great TV – gets completely drowned out.
Now, it’s not like October-December is a sporting graveyard.
But the events that rule those months – the Spring Racing Carnival, Test cricket, the final V8 rounds, golf – aren’t primetime and therefore aren’t direct competition for the NBL (Sunday afternoon games aside).
The NBL can get by in those months and even manage to build a little momentum.
However, in the ‘busy’ months – which we’ll describe here as all those between March and September plus January – breathing space is always going to be hard to come by.
What some winter advocates need to be aware of is that in this climate, mid-week games each week would almost be a necessity. That could be great for improving TV coverage of the league, but such games were deeply unpopular with rusted-on fans the last time they were in place.
Another factor that can be considered under the fan-minded lens is the NBA.
To get the highest possible audience for the NBL, it can be argued schedules that clash less with the best league in the world – which is now more accessible to local fans than ever – are ideal.
Perhaps all this is best summed up by a table. Here’s 12 different schedules, one starting each month of the year, and how much domestic and NBA competition would result:
From this, it would appear that with a six-month season, starting between July and September and finishing between December and February would work best domestically.
Conclusion
The schedule, it must be remembered, can only do so much. A fall in the Aussie dollar could send imports packing regardless of how it fits their calendar.
Other sports may make changes that fill gaps the NBL might choose to target. Test cricket at night anyone?
So it’s not a magic wand. It can’t fix everything. All we’re trying to do here is give the league a stronger foundation.
To that end, the status quo is neither perfect nor terrible. It’s among the best options for capitalising on gaps in the local sporting calendar.
It fits with the international season and there’s room for both the Flynn/Young types and the Ennis types.
The down-side is you only have about three weeks where you’re not competing with the NBA for interest among basketball fans – and there’s usually pre-season games in those three weeks anyway.
You also don’t have the chance to sign overseas Aussies to cameo deals.
But is this a case of the pros outweighing the cons? Or is there just not enough there to end the debate once and for all?
Here’s my personal view. The NBL could be forgiven for keeping the current calendar in place but cutting a month or so off the end of it, which I’ve suggested before.
That’s a fine and sensible approach that would hopefully mean the Grand Final isn’t as buried as it currently is.
However, if the NBL is both imaginative and prepared to do some due diligence, then a July-December league needs to be looked at quite seriously.
One of the faults of July-December is that you can kiss goodbye the Flynn/Young types, but their void could very well be filled by more Ennis types who no longer have to choose between money abroad and the D-League – they can have both.
Also, assuming it’s contractually doable (this is where due diligence comes in) big name Aussies can return to play for local teams around July and August.
You’d be clashing with the main football codes for a while, of course, but unlike the status quo you’d be doing it without going up against the NBA at the same time.
Also unlike the status quo, you wouldn’t be surrendering the pinnacle of your season to that clash either.
Instead, the Grand Final would occupy a heretofore unique space in the sporting landscape by finishing up mid-December (remembering that tennis gets access to key venues after then).
As for what week you’d start, how about one week after State of Origin finishes? Or, in years when the Olympics or World Cup disrupt the season, right after the NBA Finals?
A strategy along those lines would symbolise the NBL using the sporting calendar to its advantage, rather than being a victim of it.
But that’s just one way to look at it. Some will think an even earlier start is the go. Others will vouch for later.
An end to this debate could be a while away.