Basketball On The Internet.

WHAT a joke. What a pitiful, pathetic joke. SEABL? Hope you’re paying attention at how our illustrious Basketball Australia is in the cost-cutting process of devaluing everything fabulous about the WNBL.

And the thing that is most fabulous about our women’s league?

The players.

They are magnificent.

We have some of the greatest female basketball players on Planet Earth running around in our WNBL and for about the past four years, the league also has been pulling in some bona fide WNBA players.

So how does BA honor and acknowledge these great players of the ONE elite competition our erstwhile governing body has to look after?

By NOT having an awards night – which again reflects just how important the NBL’s $$$ were in staging the annual joint awards nights of recent times – but just randomly making announcements about the league’s award winners.

Say WTF?

But that’s what BA is doing.

No, it’s not enough the women’s league has its own dedicated naming rights sponsor. Even that didn’t hold sufficient cache for BA to foot the bill for an awards presentation. (Maybe BA should fly some flunkeys in for a think-tank on it.)

Instead, in a performance which reeks of amateurism, disinterest and just the most unseemly of pitiful performances by the federation in recent memory – something which makes junior basketball presentations look like the Oscars – yesterday, the first big announcements were made.

Out of the blue.

And just online.

You know, at the websites, on Twitter, Facebook – where it won’t cost anything.

Voters, as in coaches etcetera, had to cast their votes for All Star Fives and every other award of note, before last round.

Now think about that.

So Abby Bishop is Player of the Week but sorry Abs, by now that doesn’t matter. Even if you go for 40 and 20 in these last couple of rounds, it is too late for you to force your way into the All Star Five.

That was picked weeks ago, love.

And while I have no issue whatsoever with Guy Molloy winning Coach of the Year, imagine if Adelaide had won both of its Queensland games last week, and somehow snuck into the four at the season’s death!

Maybe someone out there might have changed their vote to Richard Dickel.

Again, more power to Guy, who gets my vote too and is a very deserving winner. But that isn’t the point.

This is a BA fiasco.

A farce of monumental proportions rendered irrelevant because BA has, by its own actions, deemed the WNBL irrelevant.

“Oh, we’ll just throw out a few award winners every few days so we can give them a badge, or a medal, a glass or something at their last home game. What do you think?”

Yeah, sure. It’s not as if the mainstream world gives a flying frapdoodle.

That’s how they will get away with it too, despite the indignation of any and every female basketball player, fan or official who has put their blood, sweat and tears into this extraordinary comp since 1981.

No-one who matters in the decision-making process will care. Because hell, if our own players don’t matter, why would the real world out there care?

And that is why, dear readers, BA had ZERO to do with the formation of the SEC (now SEABL) back in the day.

Or of the NBL.

Or of the WNBL.

Because it was coaches, players, clubs who drove the formation of those interstate competitions, escaping the boundaries of state associations who take their cues from the national federation.

People with passion have driven basketball to where it is today.

Not bean-counters and pencil-pushers who, this week, have taken their appalling inabilities to a new low and dragged the exceptional athletes and brilliance of one of the finest women’s basketball competitions in the world down to the lowest common denominator with them.

Yes. We all will look forward to the new announcements and revelations, especially when the MVP is awarded to Jenna or Laura or Suzy in a special ceremony in a stadium clubroom somewhere with, of course, the appropriate BA official flown in for the grand occasion because, let’s face it, no amount of money should be spared on that account.

In case you missed them, the awards so far are:

WNBL Coach of the Year: Guy Molloy (Melbourne Boomers)

Robyn Maher WNBL Defensive Player of the Year: Rebecca Allen (Melbourne Boomers)

WNBL All-Star Five: Jenna O'Hea (Dandenong Rangers)

WNBL All-Star Five: Leilani Mitchell (Dandenong Rangers)

I saw talk today on Facebook about the WNBL forming a Players Association. That would be great.

Then BA would have a lot more trouble getting away with shite like this.

Count your blessings SEABL that you had second-thoughts about handing your reins to BA.

And have no doubt why the NBL taught us all a new word last year and “demerged.”