Nick Bendel
American American American, Oi Oi Oi!
June 21st 2008 08:10
The extraordinary demise of the Sydney Kings, coupled with the continuing uncertainty surrounding the Brisbane Bullets, has shown just how shaky the league’s foundations are. If mere survival is a struggle for two of the biggest teams- which have collectively appeared in the last six grand finals, and won four of them- what chance do the rest of them have?
In some respects, the National Basketball League of today resembles the National Soccer League of a decade ago. Despite the sport’s enormous popularity at the grassroots level, sustainable success for its premier club competition has been impossible to achieve. Poor administration, negligible marketing, and an ongoing identity crisis have been holding basketball back- just as they once held back football.
And yet, on the surface, today’s NBL seems to be in better shape than the old NSL. While the latter was in the troubled position of promoting a competition whose teams were mainly ethnicised and unevenly spread, the former contains only non-ethnic franchises, which are evenly spread throughout Australasia. With two teams in Melbourne and Sydney (at least before the expulsion of the Kings), one in each of Perth, Adelaide, Townsville, Cairns and the Gold Coast, as well as representation in Singapore and Auckland, the NBL appears to have the ideal setup. So why is it failing to capture the hearts and minds of the public?
Maladministration is one of the reasons. Much has been said of the lack of attention basketball has paid to the grassroots in recent times, unlike the boom years of the late 1980s and early 90s. Deep community involvement fuelled the sport’s growth- and as that diminished, so did the popularity of clubs such as the Kings, and the league as a whole. One need only look at the deliberate way that the A-League’s Central Coast Mariners has wooed its region to understand how interacting with the community can translate into popularity and success.
The paucity of marketing is another reason for the NBL’s decline. Fox Sports may promote games- as one would expect of the main broadcaster- but when was the last time you saw an ad on free-to-air television for your local club? The season begins during the AFL and NRL finals’ series, it then continues over summer while cricket and the A-League are holding sway, before concluding just as the AFL, NRL, and Super 14 are starting up again. Given such fierce competition, the NBL cannot hope to thrive without proper marketing.
But it may be that an identity crisis is the main reason for the league’s diminishing status. Basketball is regarded by many as an American sport, at a time when the reputation of the US is fading. Andrew Gaze once argued that the growth in Australian basketball during the late 80s and early 90s was in no small part due to the popularity that American culture then enjoyed. As that culture has declined in popularity, he believes, so has the NBL.
Gaze’s observation ties in neatly with one that John Singleton, the advertising mogul, once made. Speaking during the dark years of ‘old soccer’, he opined that the image of the sport as something foreign- as ‘wogball’- was what was preventing it from winning the affection of the mainstream community. Only during Frank Lowy’s ‘new football’ era has it come to be seen as ‘Aussie’, thanks to the launch of a de-ethnicised national competition and the success of the national team. Because of that change in perception, the sport- which has long boasted a high participation rate- has finally started to grow at a commensurate rate.
So, if the NBL and its franchises hope to survive in the short term and flourish in the long term, a shift in attitude is needed. The clubs desperately need to embed themselves in their local communities; the league desperately needs to promote itself. Most importantly, people have to be convinced that basketball is as Aussie as cricket and tennis and swimming- and new football. Find a sales pitch and start selling, because if the punters have gone off the Kings and Bullets, it might not be long before they go off the other clubs too.
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