Vaqueros 1985
24/10/2015
William Rosario's Somewhere in the Americas
to read

Bye Bye BSN (with sadness)

SAN JUAN (William Rosario's Somewhere in the Americas) - One of the great basketball institutions in the world is dying a slow death. The Puerto Rican national league, Baloncesto Superior Nacional, founded in 1930 (before FIBA was even founded) is about to disappear or become very irrelevant, and there’s no way around it. There are people fighting the good fight for it not to die, but it is inevitable.

I grew up in Puerto Rico with this league as my everything. I was a fan of the Vaqueros de Bayamon before being a fan of anything else, even the national team. Forget about Michael JordanJerome Mincy and Georgie Torres were the best players in the world for me. My mother and father talked about previous greats like Ruben Rodriguez or Tito Ortiz with such enthusiasm that one wanted to go back in time to watch them play.

Baloncesto Superior Nacional had a peak of about 4 decades. That’s a long time to be on top. It hosted national superstars from the 60’s like FIBA Hall of Famer Teo CruzAlberto Zamot and Bill McCadney, the 70’s like Rodriguez, Raymond DalmauNeftali Rivera and Hector Blondet, the 80’s like Mincy and Torres, Federico Lopez, Mario “Quijote” MoralesAngelo Cruz and Wes Correa, and the 90’s like Jose “Piculin” Ortiz, Ramon RivasJames Carter and Eddie Casiano.

The best ever were best ever when they played in the league. When the national team was the 4th best in the world (1990), they all played in the league and were icons in the cities for which they played. Piculin is still beloved in San German, Quijote in Guaynabo, and Mincy in Bayamon.

The league was also a great development home for future greats in the coaching arena. Both Phil Jackson and Tex Winters (the architect of the triangle offense) coached in the league. Winters even won two titles with the Leones de Ponce in the 1950s, while Jackson was fired from Piratas de Quebradillas four years before he won the first of 11 NBA championships as a coach with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. Dr. Jack Ramsay, Paul Westhead and Del Harris also coached in the island. The list is pretty wild. Its tradition is simply unmatched in terms of national leagues in the Americas.

But it became a relic. It stopped moving along and did not kept up with the times. It refused to grow.

Calendar was one of the main issues. The league is played from March to July, away from the homogenous (or at least as it should be) FIBA Basketball calendar and against all warnings, it never changed. In one of the three or four countries where basketball is a definite number one sport, the management and ownership of the league simply did not dare to occupy more than four months in the island’s sports landscape.

In order to have a competition with an appropriate number of regular season games in that timeframe, the league is forced to play three/sometimes four games per week. With prices that average around $7 dollars per person at the cheapest, this would mean that if a family of four wants to watch the team (only at home, two times in one week), it would be around a $50 dollars per week/$200 dollars a month expense in a country that has been going through an economic crisis since 2008, that seems to be getting worse every year. It is no coincidence that attendance has gone down steadily since 2007 (even though league management has put out a press release that announces an increase, that be noted takes into account added games that inflate said numbers).

It is true that globalization has had something to do with this. Our geographical and political circumstances make it easier for the NBA to become our national league. It is slowly but surely becoming the world’s national league, so it would only make sense for it to gain traction in a basketball-centric country that is an actual territory of the United States. Against that heavy marketing army (the best in the world for any sports institution in my opinion), it is very hard/almost impossible to compete. But the Baloncesto Superior Nacional seems to have no interest in even putting up a mild resistance.

Quality of the product has been diminished to a point where it has become unwatchable by the general public standards. On TV (biggest marketing tool there is for a national league), the league decided to broadcast five games a week (instead of having only two and maybe stream the rest) and it is consistently nationally televised in unacceptable shape.

Promoted as High Definition when it’s not, with archaic graphics of no real service to the viewer (sometimes with grammatical errors), and a slew of play-by-play commentators and analysts that are not up to standards...the league has become a niche product, treated as such. The hard-core loyal fans of the league watch it, often making fun of the broadcast, while the rest of the population doesn’t even know that it exists. And it used to be a national pastime.

The league has not done a great job of promoting itself either. Even though the tournament still attracts top talent, there’s no communications strategy focused on making them icons in their respective cities. There is little-to-none information produced by the league itself and a quick look at their social media channels proves they don’t seem to have a real publishing strategy around them. It’s been three months (July 24th) since they have posted any original material in either Twitter or Facebook, and in between what they have retweeted or reposted there are articles about having less teams next season and another celebrating only one game (out of eight) of the Puerto Rico national team in the 2015 FIBA Americas Championship. How are they appealing to that coveted consumer-frenzied-18-34 years old demographic if they don’t have a new media presence?

But it’s too late now. This is the year where it reaches a point of no return.

The top three teams in last year’s regular season (Leones de Ponce, Capitanes de Arecibo and Cangrejeros de Santurce) are up for sale and will more than likely recess if not bought. The fourth team, the Atenienses de Manati, was not allowed to permanently stay in the city by the league’s central board. The fifth, my formerly beloved Vaqueros de Bayamon has 5 lawsuits for not paying their players. The Mets de Guaynabo and the Brujos de Guayama also asked for a recess.

Financially, Luis Monrouzeau, owner of the Capitanes (a very serious organization) put it best when he said to Puerto Rican newspaper Primera Hora:

“I have asked for the financial statements and they will not give them to me. The management of the league celebrates that they are in very good economic shape, but the best teams will recess and the others, more than half are in debt. How can they say they are in good economic health?”

It is a mess.

Jenaro “Tuto” Marchand, current FIBA Americas Secretary General Emeritus, and President of the Baloncesto Superior Nacional during its heyday recently went on national TV and publically declared that he has given up on the league, that he’s no longer interested. Nobody loves Puerto Rican basketball more than Tuto. If he’s saying it, maybe I shouldn’t feel as guilty about giving up on it myself.

Maybe it is time to let it die a slow death and start from scratch with a new project that is not bogged down by the traditions of the BSN. It is so sad to even say it, but this is taking our love for national basketball down with it, and that will be sadder…horrible.


William Rosario

FIBA

FIBA's columnists write on a wide range of topics relating to basketball that are of interest to them. The opinions they express are their own and in no way reflect those of FIBA.

FIBA takes no responsibility and gives no guarantees, warranties or representations, implied or otherwise, for the content or accuracy of the content and opinion expressed in the above article.

William Rosario

William Rosario

If you want the jet-lagged musings of a guy who spends half the year living basketball in the Americas right there in the organisational trenches of the continent's senior and youth championships, along with the South American and FIBA Americas League, then this column is definitely for you. William Rosario, FIBA Americas Communications Director by day and filmmaker by night (some nights), joins FIBA's team of columnists from around the world to bring you "Somewhere in the Americas".