Basketball On The Internet.

IT may not be high on the “to-do” list for NBL Pty Ltd but when the big issues are all sorted, the NBL should reclaim its own Hall of Fame.

With all due respect to Basketball Australia’s Hall of Fame, which annexed the NBL’s version a few years ago, the erratic, irregular nature of its inductions has made it seem like something of an afterthought.

A bit like: “We’ll get to the latest nominations when all the important, more pressing matters are taken care of,” which, of course, tends to lead straight to erratic, irregular inductions.

Ken Cole’s induction was hastened last year and held independently because of his pressing ill health.

Truth be told though, no-one really knows for sure if/when BA will have its next Hall of Fame induction. And those that might know sure couldn’t tell you when the one after that might be.

Erratic. Irregular.

The NBL Hall of Fame was efficient and conducted annually.

It was a highlight – for mine, THE highlight – of the year’s social calendar because, unlike MVP awards, it celebrated a person’s body of work, as opposed to the year’s finest.

At the last NBL Hall of Fame dinner, I must have won a lottery because my table included Al Green, Cal Bruton, Darryl Pearce, Reg Biddings, Herb McEachin, Mark Davis and a few other luminaries.

I felt like a wide-eyed fanboy kid again, just hanging on their stories and memories of the good times. It was basketball bliss.

Then hearing Brian Kerle, Dave Claxton, Wayne Carroll, Larry Sengstock  and Andrew Vlahov telling tales of Boomer trips – Simon Cottrell showing up to a morning national team training at a Worlds and finding he brought along two left shoes, then coach Adrian Hurley making him train in them anyway – is basketball heaven for me.

But way more importantly, the NBL Hall of Fame, for the most part, has gotten it right.

There are two notable exceptions when they got it woefully wrong, but that’s for another day.

Right now, the NBL Hall is grossly lacking at least three key names and can only again be fully credible when they are there.

The contribution Dave Adkins made in bringing the right players – many of them Hall of Famers – to the NBL from the USA in the league’s early years should not be under-estimated, underplayed or, worse still, forgotten.

His was an enormous contribution and one that should see his name right near the top of any list for the league’s Hall.

So too two of the greatest names the NBL has seen – Ken Richardson and James Crawford.

The Ohio Dynamo and the Alabama Slammer are two of our game’s greatest imports and any criteria or oversight which leaves them outside the Hall only serves to diminish the Hall.

Richardson was MVP of the NBL’s inaugural 1979 season, averaging 26.2 ppg as West Adelaide Bearcats’ playing-coach.

In 1980, Richo was in the All Star First Team, the first team of All Stars in NBL history and averaged 24.1 ppg.

These were the days of 40-minute games too.

In 1981, he missed most of the season with injury, coaching from the sidelines before player-coaching his beloved “Westies” to the 1982 championship.

He brought himself off the Bearcats’ bench and if there had been a Best Sixth Man award, he would have won that, with daylight second.

His field goal percentage that season was 58.8, bettered only by teammate Al Green’s 59.1 and the Mean Machine could thank Richo for that.

His defensive-rebound/outlet-touchdown-pass was the best in the business and his four-year NBL coaching record with the Bearcats was fourth, second, third, first.

The fact he won a Woollacott Medal in SA in 1975 as the state’s fairest and most brilliant player, had two dominating years in Victoria leading the mighty St Kilda Saints to glory before coming back to SA to playing-coach West to an unprecedented five consecutive State Championships should already have alerted BA to his bona fides for their all-embracing Hall.

But he assuredly did enough in the NBL for it to look past the criteria which specifies a 100-game minimum considering his record as a coach – taking in additional years at Geelong Supercats – was 98-58 for 63%.

That’s the second-best all-time mark for any coach who coached at least 100 games, behind only his one-time assistant at Geelong, Brian Goorjian.

West went 21-5 in 1982, an 81% success rate and averaged 97.1ppg, conceding 83.7, a winning differential of 13.4ppg.

And again, those were 40-minute games.

That “100-games played” minimum criteria should not apply to anyone who played in the league’s first four years as many of those players who made the league great, already were entering their twilight years.

Post-1983? OK. But let us never forget the men who made the league great to start with, and they weren’t all 18.

That brings me to Rocky Smith, St Kilda’s league and Grand Final MVP in 1980, who averaged 33.4ppg in a 40-minute match.

In 1981, he averaged 28.8 and was All Star Five - two years where he made a massive impact but because he doesn’t meet the games-played criteria, cannot be considered for the Hall.

That’s crazy. From 1979-83, those players who you were happy to pay to see should be the first ones considered for Hall induction.

Richardson was one of the great characters of that era, arguably its best player from 1974-83 and with a coaching record for which few give him the appropriate props.

He was “ahead of his time” apparently, once showing “blue movies” to his Bearcat team to stimulate them pre-game.

Not sure how that worked out but I am sure they provided stiff opposition.

And I love the story about his rage at halftime of an NBL game when his Geelong charges, down and struggling, sheepishly filed into the dressing room.

Ken in a rage was something. He’d been an MP – no, not a politician – and was used to subduing drunken soldiers. So a room full of basketball players?

“I want the first five to stand up,” he allegedly yelled this day at his Supercats.

This was a team of fearsome men, players such as Mark Dalton, Brad Dalton, Ian Davies, Mark Leader and NBAer Dane Suttle – not guys you’d ever mess with. But they stood up as demanded.

“Now take your right hand and put it down the front of your shorts,” he shouted.

Was he serious? The players looked at each other.

“Do it!” he screamed. And they did.

“Now feel around,” he insisted. Reluctantly, they did.

“Well,” he glared.

“Have any of you got any balls?”

They won the game.

Where Ken was unique, James Crawford was a freak.

With all due respect to Leroy Loggins and Mark Davis, JC might consider himself unlucky not to have a piece of the 1987 MVP award after averaging 34.7ppg for Perth at a league-best 63%.

I had seen the great Steve Kalocinski play for Cal Bruton’s Geelong team at the Warrnambool Seaside Carnival and when the Supercats were promoted up to the NBL and he returned to the US, was sure he was an irreplaceable piece of that successful organisation.

But Bruton found the Alabama Slammer and he debuted in 1982, averaging 26.1ppg as he steered Geelong into the Grand Final against Richardson's West Adelaide.

Crawford was All Star Five, First Team, that year and again in 1983, 1984 and 1987.

He starred at Geelong, had a year in Canberra and was at Perth from 1987-99 as a key piece of the birth of the Wildcats as the NBL’s pre-eminent club.

JC won championships in 1990-91-95 and when the Wildcats ran into the NBA champion Houston Rockets in London at the McDonald’s World Championship, he looked completely at home against them.

The first time I saw him live was at Apollo Stadium when he was leading Geelong against Adelaide in a 1982 regular season fixture.

I was sitting level with the stage-end baseline when he drove past his defender but was led behind the backboard, brought to a halt under the basket and trapped on either side. 

There was no way out. Except one. Crawford leapt out from between the double-team, ducking his head as he did as he floated back inward to the keyway and out from under the hoop, throwing down a ferocious two-hand backward dunk in the motion.

My chin was on the Apollo Stadium floor.

He went for 36 points at 61 per cent and 13 rebounds in that game. It was a hell of an Apollo debut and from there to the end of his 504-game NBL career, I never once tired of seeing him.

Not even when he was going off in the fourth quarter of Game 2 of the 1987 Semi Final against the 36ers at Apollo, where he would finish with 40 points at 67 per cent, forcing a 101-99 win to keep that series alive before his Wildcats delivered the coup de grace in Game 3.

There's never been anything quite as devastating in the NBL as a soaring Ken Richardson defensive rebound and outlet pass to a streaking Al Green or Trevor Maddiford on the break.

Richo made the NBL's early years immensely seductive and alluring to fans who previously had only ever considered basketball as that "non-contact girls game".

Then along came JC and suddenly we had a man defying gravity and thrusting the sport in Australia to a new level of spectacular action.

The Prairie Bobcat and the Alabama Slamma were pioneers and the reason the national league was able to transcend its stadium origins into multi-purpose entertainment centre venues.

As such, they truly should be fast-forwarded along with David Adkins (and Rocky Smith) into the first NBL Hall of Fame intake when/if NBL Pty Ltd rightly reclaims its origins.