Basketball On The Internet.

WHY are the NBL and the WNBL - our two elite national leagues formed back in the day by interstate clubs seeking better competition - administered by Basketball Australia?

How's that been working out for us?

Why isn't BA focusing on growing the game around the nation, running national championships, preparing national teams, overviewing the sport's sustained progress in Australia and NOT also trying to run two elite competitions?

Just cannot imagine Basketball USA, for example, also running the NBA and WNBA, for a near-enough example.

How did this even happen? Well here's a super-quick thumb-nail history lesson before continuing.

Around 1978 at the Australian Club Championships, then later in a Sydney airport hangar, reps of our leading club teams across several states met to discuss starting a national basketball league.

A year later in 1979, they had it up and running as the National Invitation Basketball League, dropping the "I" from the NIBL in 1980 as it began to grow and develop much along the lines Dr John Raschke had imagined.

By 1981, West Adelaide coach Ted Powell had orchestrated a similar set of meetings of club teams across Australia to create the birth of the WNBL.

The NBL has been around for 34 years, the WNBL for 32 - pretty decent roots should have been laid by now into the fabric of Australia's mainstream sports consciousness, right?

Wrong.

Outside New Zealand and Perth, the coverage of our NBL Grand Final series is virtually invisible.

Can you imagine any other mainstream national sport where the rest of Australia almost completely ignores the Championship Series?

So let's concede the game's elite evolution has taken a quantum leap backwards since the halcyon 90s when even NBA Commissioner David Stern was a guest at our Grand Finals in Melbourne and all of Australia was aware of this burgeoning sport.

Somewhere along the way, some bright spark - no doubt a bean-counter, not a sportsperson - came up with the "One Basketball " concept where suddenly everything would move up to Sydney and be housed under one roof.

Shared resources etcetera. It had to be beneficial, right?

So what really happened?

The WNBL was worst hit. Where it once had its own dedicated CEO, it was now administered by someone at BA, when they had time between their other duties.

Shared resources meant less people on the payroll and more people overworked trying to cater to more jobs than they were hired to perform.

What changed for the better?

I'll admit, in 2009 when the crisis hit big-time as the ill-conceived Sydney Spirit died - talk about maintaining the commitment to a team in west Sydney! - South Dragons withdrew and Melbourne Tigers also were on the verge of dropping out, BA did step up to the plate.

Larry Sengstock as CEO and some heavy hitters such as Di Smith-Gander and Bruce Spangler took some chances and managed to save an NBL which was tumbling toward a precipice of no return.

The Adelaide 36ers, Cairns Taipans, Gold Coast Blaze, New Zealand Breakers, Perth Wildcats, Townsville Crocodiles and Wollongong Hawks said they would soldier on, which ultimately drew back Melbourne Tigers and meant the 8-team competition stayed viable, albeit without a Sydney presence.

The clubs were realistic - and so was the NBL Players Association which, a lot of the time now just needs to pull its head in a bit and recognise without a viable and thriving competition, its chest-beating about points systems or 48-minute games are counter-productive to a competition in jeopardy - and we had ourselves a revitalised NBL.

Forevermore, BA owed those clubs - the Magnificent Seven - for sticking to it and drawing back the Tigers too. Fast forward a couple of years and when the Blaze were in trouble, BA cut them precious little slack. So much for holding the fort in 2009.

We were told back at the NBL's 2009 rebirth that every club would deliver a $1 million bank guarantee which would mean no franchise would disappear during a season ever again.

To this day, I firmly believe only the two community-based and saved clubs, Wollongong and Cairns, have ever actually ponied up that $1million guarantee.

Such was the anxiousness to get Sydney back into the league, some deals were done without the prior knowledge or consent of all NBL entities which had owners rightly growling.

The free-to-air television deal came on the back of the made-for-Ten-TV event Jeff Van Gronigen conjured up at the Dome a few years ago.

The former Brisbane Bullets GM opened the free-to-air door which BA, reluctantly and cap-in-hand, then quietly slunk through.

When Gold Coast bit the dust, the question of that bank guarantee was raised and quickly hushed away.

My (e)mail is this - the guarantee was steadily decreased to a manageable figure of $250,000 which, I am reliably informed two clubs (the 36ers and Kings) still could not come up with. That being the case, the guarantee then quietly disappeared without trace.

BA had precious little input in South Australia last season when the 36ers were floundering due to what appeared the imminent loss of their venue.

That situation was resolved from within.

Tell me again why BA is running the competition?

It has so much on its plate and so few mice actually doing all the pedalling in the cages, that some of the flaws, innaccuracies and inadequacies of the NBL and WNBL websites are beyond deplorable.

Frankly, the Townsville crisis is just the latest in such a steady stream that basketball long ago passed soccer in this country as the major laughing stock.

We really did ever-so-briefly threaten the AFL and NRL in the 90s - as much as a mosquito biting an ox on its butt - but that is one of the reasons the (footy-driven) media is so quick to turn on our sport at any opportunity.

And we keep giving them the ammo.

Today I read in the wake of the Crocodiles crisis a Brisbane report which said Cairns Taipans also were in trouble due to the costs of hiring the Convention Centre.

This totally erroneous and inaccurate report actually said: "It is also understood that Cairns is holding crisis talks with State Government rent on their Cairns Convention Centre home court set to bury the final nail in the club's coffin."

The reporter did not speak to a single person in the Taipans' administration but that's how it goes. Give the media a sniff of crisis in our NBL - Townsville returning its license is a good start - and it will go crazy trying (again) to bury us.

(Just FYI, I spoke with Cairns GM Mark Beecroft today who said the club would return a small operating profit for the second year in succession and that the Brisbane story was completely without merit. But who will know that?)

So again I pose this question: why is BA administering the NBL and WNBL?

Why are they not the separate entities they were when they started on this epic trail three decades ago, and simply endorsed and supported by BA?

You don't have to be Nostradamus to look at Perth pulling 12,000 fans and think the Wildcats would be better served playing in an Asian league. If we can think of it, you know they have.

If the Breakers can now pull 10,000 we have to say the NBL can work.

Each environment is unique. A community ownership model might work in Wollongong but it won't in a capital city where fans are overwhelmed with sporting choices. Their basketball club falls over? They can go watch the Broncos or Lions or Roar. No biggie.

There is no definitively perfect ownership model which suits all Australian markets and to think so is to be naive.

Basketball at an elite level CAN and SHOULD work in this country but leagues, owners, players, coaches and fans have to be realistic about what the marketplace can truly afford.

The first step in going forward would be for the clubs themselves to reclaim ownership of their two elite competitions and be allowed again to self-determine their directions.

Does it not make some modicum of sense for the people putting in the money to be the ones making the decisions?

Maybe if that was the case, Townsville could continue, Gold Coast might return and South Dragons re-emerge.

Maybe it is just a dream. But I'd take it over today's recurring nightmare.