Thanks LC, a good read. I wish he was harsher on the "inefficient management" side of things; the sole blame for Aussie basketball's current malaise is to be laid at their feet IMO, but I guess he's just trying to report the facts.

I gave up after a couple of paragraphs. Was there anything new or was it all the usual "end of Jordan, switch to Summer" guessing and little else?

On the whole it wasn't bad. Especially compared to the garbage most other sport writers put together.
I did find one bit confusing: "Andrew Gaze and Lanard Copeland dazzled sell-out crowds with their alley-oops"
Gaze and Copeland???? Surely there were better exponents of the alley-oop.
What about "Andrew Gaze dazzled crowds with his scoring ability despite being old, white, slow and incapable of leaving the floor when jumping?" :)

The Jordan factor is true. School participation numbers dropped considerably after that and have only recently returned to the previous numbers. There was also the coll factor (remember when Jordan was the number 1 most admired sports person in Australian schools?) At that time we also had all of the Jordan TV adds that were pretty special as well. If you think about it, when was the last time you saw one of those brilliant basketball shoe related adds on free to air tv in Aust? Nike adds are now mainly running or soccer based.

Still the number one factor has been both the incompetence of the admin running the league and the admin running the individual teams.
You would be stunned if you actually looked at how often the NBL teams went to schools or clubs to help sell themselves. As the article suggests, very few do anything like that and it should be a regular thing.

Until the admin improves and the level of professionalism in that area increases, the new NBL will mean little.

I think the only new thing that I haven't read before was.. 14 home games and 14 away games , and FOX will give the NBL 4 x 30second ads per game.

"Gaze and Copeland???? Surely there were better exponents of the alley-oop"

There probably was, but none spring as readily to mind as the "dynamic duo"

Back when channel 10 had the FTA coverage and actually showed it (I cringe every time I think of the letter I wrote channel 10 bagging them for not showing games live)Bill woods and some other little dude who's name escapes me, nearly wet their pants every time the "dynamic duo" hit an alley oop.

I still say the move to summer was a positive. We are competing with soccer, tennis and cricket...at the moment, big deal.

Has everyone forgotten the AFL & NRL play during the winter. Throw in V8 super cars, Formula 1 and a host of other big sporting events, and summer sure looks better.

I think Summer isn't a bad thing either - would just be nice if the Sixers could negotiate with the Reds and not schedule games on the same night.

Did Stephen Quartermain used to commentate on Ten? I seem to remember him excitedly yelling "alley-oop to Copelaaanndd!" on several occasions.

Basketball is an indoor sport and should move season times, starting two weeks before footy finals this year is quite maniacal (deriving from the word maniac i think). I love it how people seem to think things need to go back to how they were 10-15 years ago for things to be successful, ideally, yes this would be good but trying something left-field might be more preferential rather than basically strengthening finacial stability of clubs and winding up for another onslaught on the aussie public like back in the day will mean at best the sport will peak again then fall away. What about having a knockout season before main season whereby rules are NBA rules prior to full season whereby rules return to basic fiba rules.

Opening import restrictions, perhaps creating divisions whereby the top 2 teams advance regardless of overall win/loss record (it works in the NBA), AIS team, trades over a short period at beggining of season - 2 create some newspaper space at least etc etc, i've already said all this before.... can't be bothered doing it again.

besos

Blaming woes on the change to summer is one of my pet hates. Strikes me as a case of correlation not implying causation.

I did say a week ago that 14 would be the magic number when it came to home games.

Hope that is true.

14 would be good . Starting in oct is also good.
They've got Hobart and Canberra interested every year.
D-league in winter would be good.

"Bill woods and some other little dude who's name escapes me, nearly wet their pants every time the "dynamic duo" hit an alley oop"

Steve Carfino??

DB5, Yeah well Carfino wets his pants every time an import farts, but it just came to me, Steve Quartermaine. The smallest dude to ever take on Van Damn and win!

Bingo, hereschenes, you beat me to it.

and FOX will give the NBL 4 x 30second ads per game

I would say that the space is for the NBL to factor in to sponsorship packages.

As in Sponsor the league and as part of that you will get 2 minutes of ad space on national TV which is normally valued at $x.

Ideally the home team maybe able to benefit from this as well to promote their naming right sponsor.

Also worth noting is that Fox would be valuing that ad space into their $35mill deal.

So people are clear this means that FOX are not giving the league 35mill in cash to do with what they like.

Problem with reducing the home games is that they're increasing the salary cap meaning that players are getting paid more to play fewer games and in a climate where most teams are not making money and will could less from a reduction in games.

The $7million per season, I have heard, could be as little as $1million in real money.

Sure as hell they'd be overvaluing the package as well.

What they are offering is NO great shakes, in fact not really much above previous arrangements....they should be talking to TenHD and bring another player in to the negotiations.

I'd just be curious to know what a 30second ad
on national tv would be valued at.
Just approx... like is it $1 or a million dollars ?

Depends on the ratings of the show.

$7,000 for an average show but a big one off say special event could be $10k plus and that is on FTA

There is only 28% of households that have pay tv.

OK and thanks.
So about $3M for the season that could be on sold to sponsors. Rather than the NBL coming on and telling us what we're watching.

No. 1 factor for me was no free-to-air coverage.