MELBOURNE (Paulo Kennedy's View from Downunder) - Impost or opportunity? That's the question some have asked about the new qualifying system for the FIBA Basketball World Cup.

It's a particularly important question for an association like Basketball Australia (BA) who aren't flush with finances and don't have a long tradition of people turning out to see their national teams play.

So when the New Competition System tips off in November they'll be leaping into the unknown of regularly hosting games without any real idea what the public response will be.

"It does provide a cost impost on Basketball Australia and that's going to be challenging," BA Chair Ned Coten told me. "While there is more opportunity there is more cost, we have to get the team together more often, more airfares, hotels etc … FIBA have some rules around this but in Australia the rules are difficult because we’re so far away. For a guy to come from Brisbane to Perth or vice versa for a training session is a four-hour trip." 

BA has some quality recent experience of hosting big international fixtures, with the 'Homecoming' games of 2015 filling the 15,000-seat Rod Laver Arena and last year's 'Farewell' game against NCAA all-stars almost packing the 10,000-capacity Hisense Arena in Melbourne.

The Homecoming games, featuring Game 1 of the Boomers' and Opals' qualifying series against New Zealand, saw BA partner with the Victorian Government and others to put on a show with our country’s NBA stars back in town.

BA CEO Anthony Moore marked his arrival in the job by leading a superb event that not only drew people, but put on a show, impressed the government and other major partners, presented very well on TV and received excellent media coverage in a football-dominated time of the year.

"Anthony really drove that and did an incredible job with it," Coten said. "We had partners who also helped us, and that's the way forward, we are good at some things and not good at others so we need to build capability in those areas… We're putting in place a 10-year program, where we look at how we can bring big events to Australia and who we partner with on that."

Who are the stars?
But that's where the catch of the new qualifying set-up comes in. While crowds flocked to see the likes of Patty Mills, Andrew Bogut, Joe Ingles and Matthew Dellavedova in the green and gold, those players won’t be in uniform for the majority of the Boomers’ home qualifiers.

"While on one hand we can sell more games, our experience is until now it's been difficult to sell games unless you've got a recognised international star who's actually on the floor," Coten said.

But from my chat to Coten it was clear BA is now feeling much more confident about their ability to make the new system work for them than when they first considered it a couple of years ago, and that is in no small part due to the work on new NBL owner Larry Kestelman.

"Larry Kestelman and his team, Jeremy Loeliger, they've done an incredible job in building the league back up again," Coten said. "The sport owes Larry a great debt of gratitude for everything he's done, and I think he’s proven you can bring games back to the game if you're putting on a great product."

What the resurgence of the NBL has delivered to BA are recognisable and marketable local faces who will be representing Australia in the qualifying windows.

So while they don't have the same pull as Patty or Delly, when Chris Goulding plays for the Boomers in Melbourne, or Nathan Sobey makes his debut in Adelaide, that will be a genuine marketing tool for BA to attract those fans who are once again flocking to club basketball.

"(Larry) has put those players back on the back page again and we need to continue that, so we're very buoyed by that, because it proves if the products good enough people will come and watch it," Coten said.

What should be even more heartening for hoops fans in the level of cooperation between BA and the NBL to make sure a tricky new system of international teams playing during club seasons as easy as possible.

It turns out that behind the scenes Coten, Moore and High Performance Manager Jan Stirling have already been working closely with Kestelman and Loeliger on this front for some time.

"We have a meeting with Larry and Jeremy every month, myself and Anthony," Coten said. "With Jan Stirling, they're literally four or five times a day communicating about how this will work at the moment. It’s not without its issues, because there’s a bit of tension between how much time they spend with their NBL team and how much time they spend with the Boomers. But they've been fantastic in the way they're trying to accommodate the players, and we are trying to be fair in what we ask for."

"The answer is absolutely and we are fully committed to making sure what we’re doing supports the NBL and won't hurt it," Coten said emphatically.

Impost or opportunity?
Back to the original question, whether this system is impost or opportunity, for Coten it is a cost impost initially, but one that gives BA the chance to recreate what itself and the Boomers mean to the Australian basketball public.

"I think it provides a fantastic opportunity for us in Australia. You don't have to be Einstein to work out the current system is really not ideal," he said. "In 2015 when we had that 15,000 crowd at Rod Laver, the reason was it was a game that counted and we had our NBA players back. It was the first in years we had a serious game that people could come and see. Now we get to provide that on a regular basis … that then underpins the commercial and marketing outcomes, you can’t have a national team boosting the profile of the sport unless they're playing, and until now we haven’t had that."

Coten says if BA can make the most of that then the sky is the limit for a sport that has long been a sleeping giant.

"There's no shortage of basketball fans in Australia, we've got the second-highest number of NBA league pass subscriptions in the world, we’ve got stadiums bursting at the seams," he said. "The thing we haven’t done very well is convert that into interest in the national teams and that’s the challenge for us."

Paulo Kennedy

FIBA

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