The majority of players will have to go out and get jobs probably outside of basketball and may never return to play full time NBL so it would be very difficult to rebuild the League.

The Leagues best players could go overseas but the middle & lower ranked players could not survive for that long out of contract.

Terrible idea. What does this achieve?

Sponsors would be less willing to sponsor teams if the league had to take a break because it lacked teams. And many of the below average players would be out of a job or have to move for a 1 year rental job. Doesn't make sense

So many downsides that I hope for your sake that you're trolling.

Many fans wouldn't renew. Players would leave and be less likely to return. Dedicated journalists would be dumped. Brand would drop. There's no way the league would "save up some money" in the interim.

Now that I think about it, its a pretty bad idea but with how things are going the NBL needs to think of something.

Maybe they should remove the $1M guarantee for Clubs and just let the Clubs survive on their own merits.

BA have already rejected 2-3 Clubs from entering the NBL due to non-compliance regarding the financial guarantee.

If the existing Clubs agreed then teams from Melbourne, Brisbane & Wellington could be viable by next season.

I'm sure BA thinks its doing the right thing but sometimes if you set the bar too high you are setting yourself up to fail.

Also having BA take over running the NBL & WNBL has not been successful - both these Leagues need to be operated more professionally and I don't see BA as the best candidate.

Again I'm sure they have the best intentions but they are not delivering the best outcome financially for the Leagues.

"return to a semi professional league contained within Australia"

HAHAHA someone wants rid of the Breakers because Australian teams can't beat them :P

The National Soccer league went into Demise. Took a year and half off, and came back in the form of the A-League.

The failure of the NSLwas far different to the NBL. They had to shut down for a year because all it's clubs bar Perth Glory were brand new franchises. The reason they started fresh with new clubs was to make the brand more mainstream to allow fans from all backgrounds to follow the one club per city. The old NSL had too many suburban ethnic based clubs and could never grow, plus they had all the racial problems with it.

Far different the the NBLs problems where there is no commercial interest, clubs are struggling to survive and interest is pretty low except for a few teams. If the NBL shut down for a year and rebranded like the a- league, its comeback would be more like the ABL (baseball). Completely forgotten and irrelevant.

Football is a completely different proposition to basketball. While the semi-professional NSL ran for 28 years folded for a season it was semi-pro in name and governance only with players earning excellent wages. The A-Leage that replaced it was a truely pro competition in every respect that leveraged 3 existing teams and created 5 new ones off the back of a national football participation of over 1,000,000 participants (now 1.7m) in a game players for nearly 150 years in this country and with strong semi-pro competitions in all the States of Australia and NZ. To put it into perspective, the annual turnover of the A-Leagues biggest team is approximately that of the entire NBL. In market value terms it is worth much, much more than that. In addition to these issues of scale, football has a range of revenue streams outside of the A-League that basketball can only dream of, and even where there are some parallels (global, young, edgy) just stop and think for a minute about the A-League All Stars game against Manchester United at an instantly sold out ANZ Stadium and compare that to the long established NBL equivalent? Finally, if there is some insight for basketball from the football 'reboot' - it's that it must go hand in hand with 'root and branch' restructuring of every aspect of the game from top to bottom - a scorched earth approach is needed. My suspision is it will be back to a ether status for a few years - this, along with an independent Crawford Report style public inquiry is the very least that fans should be demanding. The FFA are now rolling out a national second division to underpin the A-League. It is from this second division that future expansion will occur. The NBL, with a fraction of footballs participation, could do worse than get back to its roots and grow organically back to professional status.

They need to spend a season creating a new launch, maybe moving the season to the old schedule, then they won't have to leave public eye but can create a whole new buzz and have some extra time to get proper sponsorship and tv deals sorted, plus all the internal issues. If the NBL could get a euro team of some significance to come play an exhibition game that would help, or even better 2 nba teams. That buzz helped alot for the A-League and has continued to.

Given the success of Euroleague, Isn''t it time the NBL forms and becomes part of a wider AsiaLeague, where in addition to its Oz/NZ NBL regular season the best teams play in off against the best asian teams. hosting events in Australia of asian vs NBL teams and playing the top asian bball teams in Asia. The CBA continues to grow and has attracted the talents of many NBA players over the last 4 years, including JR Smith, Tracy Mcgrady, gilbert arenas, Kenyon Martin, stephen marbury...

More TV coverage in asia would earn NBL more money, sponsors would be exposed to foreign markets, in which the NBL could ask more from its main sponsors or have additional sponsors for asian league, profits to be distributed amongst the NBL clubs etc.

that or it becomes a street ball league. (jokes)

From what Ive heard working capital has been more of an issue than the guarantee, but I do think that should be reduced.

I dont think the NBL should take a year off because that would waste the growth of the past four years. The positive is three teams will likely make a profit this season and Melbourne believe they can go close next season.

What BA and the clubs need to do is figure out some cost reductions so new teams in Melbourne and Brisbane are viable and teams like Adelaide, Sydney and Townsville can reduce those losses.

The cost of setting up again after a year off might mean some clubs just dont bother.

Ricey, you really think the NBL or BA could get the buzz and start A-League got? I wouldn't trust them to pull it off. And getting it wrong would be embarrassing.

If they used a season to get some actual professionals in to show them how to fix some issues. Marketing/advertising being a big issue they need to solve for the league and teams, source solid sponsors who have a name recognised by everyone (Nike or ADIDAS maybe), lose the points cap, create an infrastructure for media liaisons as it seems one isn't really in place, and some more. If a few weeks before the season starts we had say Perth vs Barcelona (not going to happen, but hypothetically, more likely a strong euro team) play an exhibition game to help create a new buzz also that would help.

They have been crying foul for years about how hard it is and blah blah blah. That's all due to their lack of imagination and ability to do what they are paid for. It's not hard to try something different when you've been doing the same thing for a decade and wrong.

Teams need to add more entertainment, and quality at that also. There needs to be something on the way in to the stadium, between quarters, etc. They also need to be more active on social media. When Mitch was on the Facebook page the interactions went through the roof compared to normal.

If they can make rash decisions in a month, I don't see why they can't make thought out and concise ones over 6+ months.

I wonder whether shutting it down for a season will mean more enthusiasm and filled stadiums when it all starts up again, or whether we'll lose fans for good.

What were the stats for attendance for the 2012/13 season? Did we see a lot of fans at the start of the season (because they'd been starved during the off-season), followed by a drop-off towards the middle? Or did attendance depend on which teams were winnning at the time?

As a general rule crowds increase as the season goes on.

Andrew Vlahov tried to get Asia connected to Australian basketball.
I gather he has totally closed down that project?

Vlahov gets 3 Asian teams to Broome every year and the wildcats. So the Asian concept is not dead in the water. Air Asia series is doing better than the NBL, the only problem they have is not enough decent size venues yet.

I like his concept of getting the court from interstate and putting grand stands in a car park with the drop in court in the middle.

The difference between vlahov and the NBL is he is a work horse. Gets out there and gets a job done which users less cash employing people to do jobs you can do or a few of your employees being hands on workhorses also helps...

I don't think that any of that Broome-Asia concept can be used to help the NBL, altho it uses a major team from the NBL, the Wildcats. You're right, AV is a work horse but these are his private company projects and he has total control. Have always wondered how it would be if he had been a bigger player in BA.