Import from where? Pay them how much? Your top Aussie refs earnt 15k before tax last year....good luck with that

At least one NBL ref was invited to do some training and education at the recently completed NBA Summer League. Maybe some reciprocity?

Matt Beattie went to NBA summer league, the year before was Tim Boswell and the year before that Chris Reid. Its a FIBA driven program and the referee attending must be under 35 years of age. No NBA ref will come here seeing there season starts in November.

There used to be a Yank ref here in Oz a long time ago. That went poorly I recall.

Nothing wrong with our officials, people spend too much time worrying about this stuff, we have some very good Australian official.

LOL Referee's are the least of the Leagues worries...

Unfortunately the excellent refs that were about have retired. The older new ones are passable and the new kids on the block have zero communication skills. The referee supervisors fail to instil in the kids that friendly interaction with players and coaches should be paramount.
Equally unfortunately is the refs inablilty to communicate some of their dubious decisions well.
They are now a protected species in most sports and it's little one they cop a bagging across most sports.
As said above, the NBL has far greater things to worry about than the refs right now.
The 5 days of NBL / week is a poor decision and equally where will the pool of poor refs come from that already can't cope with an elite standard of basketball in Australia.

Refereeing standards in Australia are not the issue that some whingers make them out to be. It certainly is not something I notice when watching the game.

Some perspective: money is being spent on things that will get more of your average fans to tune in and watch. Referees are certainly not one of those things -- and if they are, they come WAY down the list.

Let's focus on the things that DO need to improve, like TV rights, standard of TV broadcast, standard of imports, flashiness of players... the type of things that the casual fan take note of. Leave the age-old whinging about refs behind - every sport has "that" fan that takes this angle.

If the drop in standards since the start of the AFL reason is anything to go by, we need not concern ourselves at all.

No matter what is done to promote a standard of officiating at the start of a season, be it AFL, NBL or whatever, they always tend to drift back to how it was before all the points of emphasis.

I recall the NBL last season starting off saying they will have the ref's officiate properly so the game will get the dunks and offensive scoring we all want, but what happened?

I will tell you what happened, the same thing as is happening right now with the AFL and the way their umpires are forgetting that 'holding the ball' rule and the 'in the back' rule and goodness knows what else.

They have drifted back to how it was a year or two ago, and the NBL did exactly the same after a few weeks of tightening the decisions, they allowed holding in the key and wrestling all to come back into the game.

Whatever they try to do and whatever they try to promise us in improvements with the officiating we need to forget, or take with a grain of salt!

Won't last long, so needn't stress over it, even if it is something important to the league, it won't be for very long.