Basketball On The Internet.

LOVE them or hate them, there is no doubt the Melbourne Tigers face a unique problem in the NBL.

It's not a unique problem in itself - because other clubs in rival sports experience it too - but it is unique to the Tigers in our league and one that eventually will threaten their existence when the Melbourne East Demons emerge out of basketball's heartland.

Who are the Melbourne East Demons?

No-one at this point.

It's just my "working title" for the NBL club mooted to start out in the Knox-Nunawading-Ringwood-Waverley-Oakleigh-Doncaster-this-list-could-go-on-for-a-while area which is home to the hotbed of grassroots basketball in Victoria, if not Australia.

(A few older Victorian readers might know there's a wink to the past with that particular working title club name, but let's just go with it for the purposes of argument.)

One of the less obvious things which stood out for me at the PreSeaSon Tournament last week was the general indifference towards the Tigers from the myriad juniors attending Dandenong Stadium on Friday night for their various grand finals.

They were more interested in watching the Wildcats, Hawks or Crocodiles which, initially I put down to the fact they can see Melbourne any week in-season, while the other clubs were a novelty.

But Vic basketball folk with whom I spoke assured me that wasn't it at all. Non Melbourne Tigers fans hate the club because it IS a club, with junior teams at all grades and built-in resistance to supporting them at NBL level.

It's a bit of a tragedy but not one the Tigers can do much about.

In Perth, the Wildcats represent the state so any and all basketball supporters can rally behind THEIR team.

The same is true for the 36ers, who started as an amalgam of our local league clubs and therefore instantly garnered support across ALL clubs.

Originally, SA started with two club teams, West Adelaide Bearcats and Glenelg Tigers, the latter unable to continue with the financial commitment the NBL required and replaced by West Torrens. Without going on for ever about Sixers history, fact was Torrens, as Forestville, could not afford to continue after two seasons and so the district clubs in Adelaide merged to form the composite entity.

West soldiered on alone but with seven-eighths of the local basketball population firmly behind the composite team, it became increasingly difficult for the Bearcats to survive.

Once they, too, merged into the 36ers program, all South Australia had one team to follow - a team for all. In no time, that team was SO popular, it had to build a new 7,800-capacity stadium to accommodate the fans who no longer could cram into the 3000-seat Apollo Stadium.

Look across the Tasman at the Breakers and you have a team for ALL New Zealanders to support.

Check out the Taipans in Cairns or the Crocodiles in Townsville and you have cities behind them. The same is true for the Kings in Sydney and the Hawks in Wollongong.

Galvanising a city's support behind you gives you rare potency, except in one instance I can think of and that was with West Sydney Razorbacks a few years ago.

When the Kings went, shall we say, into hiatus, and the Razorbacks became Sydney's sole NBL club, they made a half-baked decision to rename themselves the Sydney Spirit, signing Kings captain Jason Smith to complete the transition.

Now if the Spirit had thrown buckets of money at promotion and marketing, their plan may have had half a chance. But they did not.

In fact they became two-time losers, not only failing to "fill the void" for Kings fans but in the process also alienating their fans in western Sydney who basically went with: "Well stuff you then if we're not good enough for you" ... and deserted the club too.

The Spirit were dispirited well before the season was over. Instead of filling the Kings' void, they fell into one and never reappeared.

But that's a one-off story of failing to read your market. The fact is, if you can capture the public's imagination and be sold to them as "their" team, chances are you will succeed.

We have the same issue here in SA with our two AFL teams. The Adelaide Crows sell themselves as the "team for South Australia" so it doesn't matter if locally you support Central Districts, Norwood, Glenelg or West Adelaide. If you're from SA (and do not already have an AFL affiliation dating back to the VFL days), the Crows are an easy sell as "your" team.

Port Adelaide has an entirely different set of AFL problems. Because the Power were born from the Port Adelaide Magpies who play in the SA competition, their only immediate support came from those fans who supported them locally.

For a supporter say, of a Norwood, which is a traditional rival of Port's locally, it would be inconceivable to support Port (as the Power) in the AFL.

Most of the club's issues, I believe, are drawn directly from the fact they have such problems broadening their fan base because they are battling a built-in dislike/hate factor.

Which brings me all the way back to the Melbourne Tigers.

If you as a junior, or as parents and siblings of juniors, who compete against the Tigers in domestic Victorian competitions, are then expected to shelve your allegiance to Nunawading or Dandenong or Werrribee or Sandringham or whichever club it is, to then go out and cheer for Melbourne at NBL level, well, it isn't going to happen.

It would be the same as expecting fans who followed North Melbourne (Coburg) Giants to go and support Melbourne, or South Dragons fans to now switch to the Tigers. Won't happen.  

Hell, if Melbourne wasn't drawing crowds eons ago when it was suiting three Hall of Famers (Gaze, Copes, Bradtke), why should it now?

Lack of success also may have had a little to do with it because those Gaze-Copeland-Bradtke teams were together for a dozen years and returned a net of two championships, 1993 and 1997.

They were under-achievers without any shadow of a doubt. Off the top of my head, they should have won in 1994 and 2002. In 1994, they came back to Melbourne for Games Two and Three of the semi-final series against Adelaide trailing 1-0 in the best-of-three.

But the 36ers lost captain and star Mark Davis to a dislocated shoulder during Game One and he would play no further part in the series.

Instead, the Tigers dropped Game Two at home and went out in straight sets at the Tennis Centre after coach Lindsay Gaze again erred on the side of caution.

The 36ers were playing as men possessed, Phil Smyth having a blinder and Andrew Svaldenis the game of his life.

Bradtke was in a little foul trouble so Lindsay gambled on a tall gangly kid named Chris Anstey and bang, the complexion of the game completely changed.

Adelaide had no answer for this kid they had barely seen before and he singlehandedly brought the Tigers back into a winning position.

Even Lindsay recognised that, and sat him down, putting Bradtke back in.

Adelaide won, then was swept 2-zip in the Grand Final by North Melbourne.

It was one the Tigers simply let slip, as they did in 2002 when they squandered the semi final series to West Sydney. That was after they won Game One of that series by 21 points!

Another championship run had run aground.

So yes, that era's team under-achieved and hardly would have attracted passion from the non-committed fan.

I recall a classic KO quarter-final in 2004 at The Cage where Melbourne eliminated Adelaide 111-107 in an absolutely superb game of high-intensity, high-quality basketball.

There only were about 2,000 people there and when Lindsay was asked about that (lack of support) in the post-game press conference, he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that the people who had not come were the ones who had missed out. He was sorry for them.

Yeah.

OK.

The six billion people on the planet at the time who chose not to come had, indeed, missed a classic contest. But I'm pretty sure they didn't give a toss, which was the point. How to make some more of them care, especially in Melbourne.

Seamus McPeake rearranged the Tigers program to be financially viable, using his own business as a catalyst in his business model. But it did not bring fans beyond what Melbourne already could claim as its own.

So the Tigers have two issues to address, if they are prepared to concede the rest of Melbourne basketball does not care for them and is unlikely to as long as they exist as a Victorian basketball entity.

The first is they MUST ensure as many of the club's own membership is at games as possible, draw clashes, etcetera, notwithstanding.

If that is achieved, the Tigers should NOT target basketball fans of other clubs in Melbourne but home in on the entertainment dollar instead. Go after the youth market which follows the NBA and NCAA and thinks hoops is "cool".

They have to comprise the Tigers' core supporter base.

Because you know when they emerge to play NBL, East Melbourne Demons will draw support from right across the region they represent.

That is, of course, unless they go with Knox Raiders or Nunawading Spectres or anything similar as the new name. If they did that, they would just be biting into the same set of problems the Tigers have.

Pretty sure the new club will be too smart for that.