It's doing something right. I hate 'soccer' and found myself watching the last 15mins mainly because of Villa - great equalizer.

It's been a long time since the NBL has had 68k to its first 12 games like it has this season, so they'd be happy with that, but the crowds in Sydney and Melbourne this round were disappointing, especially Sydney after a great R1 win in front of 7k.

Why do you hate Football? Have you ever played it?

Definitely, it's just a case of what (or if) they're prepared to pay. That will come down to if/how well the league presents and sells a more TV-friendly model. Having new teams in Brisbane and Melbourne would certainly help, the former looking more likely than the latter.

Wellington will be gone by 2016 as well.

I love the soccer, I also love the basketball, gridiron, cricket, football, league etc... I guess I love sport!

Yes, the A-League is getting it right, however comparisons with the NBL can be decieving, especially if we are looking at crowd paticipation numbers.

You cannot compare stadiums and their capacity, the open air environment of a 25-50,000+ seat arena with that of an indoor stadium with up to 20,000 capacity.

Conceptually and the fact that they are both world games with huge potential in the market place, yes there are comparisons, but please make apples v apples, not comparing attendances.

Yes, I don't think you can compare the two.

My comparative sentiment was more in regards to the NRL, whose attendances seem to be declining pretty quickly.

I think the NBL has lots its Fanatical edge....
sure there are a heap of Juniors playing Basketball, but how does that equate to filling stadiums.

I don't attend many games of A league, but when i do it is for melbourne victory type rivalry matches, or to see big name stars....

What will get me to the NBL?
I used to be a season ticket holder in the glory days of the sixers.... Davis, trimmingham, rose, Mee, KB....
And the rivalry of Gaze, copeland... James crawford, ricky grace....

Now the NBL holds no appeal, no enertainment, over priced, no hype, no personalities... no superstars...

I agree with the NRL v A-League comparison, no issues there, the A-League are in front. TV ratings are also something I would consider a fair comparison over sporting codes with all things being equal.

However, to put it into an equal comparison model would require analysis of those statistics based on what drives them.

Therefore we must be fair and compare the promotional dollars, the media hype, the amount of money being spent on sallary caps to attract marque players and drive the initial interest to a point where equally we can compare the sports.

It is here that we struggle (basketball), IMO this is where we need to improve before we can even begin to make comparisons. Can't put the cart in front of the horse here, we need to initiate the interest and build our sport from the ground up like the A-League di a number of years ago...

The A-League are nowhere near the NRL, whose TV rights are worth $200 mill a year, which is worth around 10 times the A-League once you've taken the Socceroos out of the FFA deal.

The A-League might get there some day, but when the vast majority of their games rate in five figures, many in mid-five figures in NBL territory, they have a long way to go.

"33k for the game at Adelaide Oval." This is a skewed result because they will be playing the rest of their games at Coopers Stadium which has a capacity of 17k.

It's all well and good listing NBL CEOs but they've rarely been the ones who have held the power, the clubs have. Until we get an independent commission the league won't reach its potential, but the clubs won't hand over power until HQ delivers cash. It's a bit chucken-iggy.

I went to Victory Vs Wanderers at Etihad in Round 1. Had the best seats in the house and they cost me a shade over 40 bucks.

For the record, I don't really enjoy soccer (can't get past the flopping and diving), but had some mates who were keen so what the hell.

Price point, price point, price point...

Keneally never ran the NBL. She was in the job 5 minutes and was offloading it.

In her time, Chuck ran the league.

I reckon Paul that in both Rymarz's and Ali's time (Burton was after Ali I think) the league office had considerably more power and resources than in more recent times. I also think Burton was given a pretty free hand.

Well, anon, it's no doubt that its a growing problem in our league, but its going to happen when the standard of officiating is very poor.

And who here thought the flopping would reduce with the exit of Goulding...?!

NBL suffers from same problem as A-League TV wise in that the stay at home punter can easily switch to watching a better international league such as NBA or EPL. Therefore NBL has to really concentrate on making the watching live experience as good as possible.

As for A-League closing in on NRL, I think someone alluded to it correctly above, the NRL beats A-League both in terms of viewers and TV deal by about 20 to 1. Standard club game viewers are about 1,000,000 to 50,000. Even last year's A-League grand final could only attract roughly the same amount of viewers as a meaningless rep trial game (City v Country) for NRL on the same weekend. NRL has 4 out of the top 5 TV shows in Aust so far this year, I think A-League's entire season viewers might not equal the NRL grand final on its own.

But back to most important point which is NBL, I must admit I don't religiously watch it as much as I used to, not sure why. I think like most people on this forum I wish the NBL had great success like early 90s but not sure exactly what the answer is.

I don't watch NRL but if I do flick to it, I always notice the small crowds. It is such a bad look to the game. They cannot sustain their financial model for too many years if that continues.
I would love it if the NBL would return to winter because it is an alternative to all the footy codes. There is no NBA or Euroleague to watch. There is only baseball on espn at this time of year.
There is too much competition in the summer months. All the American sports and college sports, all the European football leagues and all the sports in Australia. ALeague, all cricket formats, horse racing and golf. That is a lot of completion.

Also another thought is for the coaches. I think they should focus on creating exciting plays. I noticed that teams pass the ball around too much. What happened to looking for the alley oop or isolation to take your man on or even the simple pick and roll plays. Teams don't do this often enough. It's always pass the ball around to find the open man or dump it in the low post. At least make it look exciting. Maybe drive and kick out to the open man. Just anything to make it look exciting.

I don't watch NRL but if I do flick to it, I always notice the small crowds. It is such a bad look to the game. They cannot sustain their financial model for too many years if that continues.
I would love it if the NBL would return to winter because it is an alternative to all the footy codes. There is no NBA or Euroleague to watch. There is only baseball on espn at this time of year.
There is too much competition in the summer months. All the American sports and college sports, all the European football leagues and all the sports in Australia. ALeague, all cricket formats, horse racing and golf. That is a lot of completion.

Also another thought is for the coaches. I think they should focus on creating exciting plays. I noticed that teams pass the ball around too much. What happened to looking for the alley oop or isolation to take your man on or even the simple pick and roll plays. Teams don't do this often enough. It's always pass the ball around to find the open man or dump it in the low post. At least make it look exciting. Maybe drive and kick out to the open man. Just anything to make it look exciting.

There is no doubt in my mind that the way the media 'sells' the sport means so much in the way it is perceived.
The A-League is not really a quality competition by any stretch but once you have a media partnership with Newscorp you guarantee a healthy coverage.

One great example is cricket. No-body here seems to get on their case but their domestic competition is a disgrace. Their current 50 over competition could not interest any free-to-air channels and even FoxSports didnt want it so Cricket Australia pays for the production itself and the airtime on Gem. What sort of crowds are they getting? In the hundreds if they are lucky.

However, they still get a positive coverage and hourly updates from all the main news services.

Unfortunately, Basketball has failed to create strong media relationships and that will be extremely difficult to re-build. The NBL does not even have a dedicated media person at the moment to help build stories and interest.

It is going to be a hard slog for a long time.

@Frederick, I agree with what you have posted, it may well be a slog for some time, but we are trying and with some luck and planning I think there is a future here for basketball.

The NRL is almost at a ceiling in Australia, don't get me wrong I loved the NRL final this year, far more exciting than the AFL final, so boring.

Basketball is a world game though, not like the NRL or the AFL, so while they hold market share at the moment, it is world games such as soccer and hoops that have room to increase exposure and grow their portion of the market I believe.

Yes, it will be a slog, but we have something the AFL and NRL don't, world wide appeal...

I think the A-League must be the only league in Australia and one of the very few leagues in world that places this much analysis on their crowds. They love their crowd figures - always tooting their attendance horn!

Yes crowd figures interest me greatly, and Im always following the NBL's and A-League's crowds closely, but the A-League take it to extremes! It feels like the first thing that gets mentioned with the A-League is the attendance.

Personally, I think they are sugar coating it a bit. 33,000 in Adelaide won't happen again because they play at Hindmarsh Stadium - capacity around 18,000? They may well average 15,000 a game at the end of the season and thats great, but in reality its probably on par with the MLS in the US and mid level leagues in Europe.

The Sydney match was a derby.Therefore a one off. And don't forget most of these teams with the exception of Adelaide and probably Perth play in large stadiums where for the most part is played to less than half full crowds.

Lets not get too carried away with the A-League. Things might be rosy now, but they still only have 10 teams and rely heavily on massive promotion, advertising, and a super generous media to get them to where they are. They have to spend a lot of money to get to this point. But if you have the money to spend it, why wouldn't you?

The NBL operates on a shoe string budget with NO help from Channel 10 to promote the game. Considering this, they are doing much better than they are criticised for.

On the NBL's issues: Melbourne and Sydney need a rocket up their organisations to bring the NBL into the relevant zone. Perth and NZ doing well means nothing for the league and it shows.

Wildcats Fan.

Every league in the world talks crowds, regularly, when they have a good result. The A-league are no exception.

A few years back the AFL was trumpeting a statistic that said that they were the third (now fourth) most attended (average crowd) league in the world.

If you looked at the complete attendance list here, and sorted it by average crowd, the A-league would be in exceptional company if it averaged 15,000 per year. Especially considering three other Australian sports leagues would rank above it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues

FWIW the NBL apparently has the sixth highest average crowd of any pro basketball league in the world.

It goes NBA approx 17K, WNBA 8K, Euroleague 8K, PBA (Philippines) 7K, ACB (Spain) 6K, NBL 5K.

They are average crowds per game.

NRL doesn't get great crowds because:

a). most teams are based in Sydney, a city with a very poor sporting culture

b). it is a package that looks so good on on TV due to the nature of the action

It's still in a much better place than basketball, even if they are losing tonnes of ground to Aussie Rules in Western Sydney thanks to GWS.

I think they're losing more ground to the Wanderers than GWS. It's a failing of basketball that we haven't had similar success in the sport's heartland in SE Melb.

I've heard there's a real grass roots problem now with Aussie Rules on the ground in Western Sydney and they're starting to be competitive with League there even on a junior level, which has to be worrying for the NRL

Not much of a skillset crossover between league and soccer, but AFL is really poaching lots of junior league players now which will have a knock-on (no pun intended) effect later on.

It mightnt have been intended but it was a good one!

The lack of international competition hurts the AFL and to a lesser extent the NRL.

Fair point HO, but it just seems like the A-League put more concentration into their attendances than other leagues.

The AFL talk up their crowds too, but not to the same extent as the A-League. You dont see headlines in most sports websites about how they got 90,000 to the MCG for an Anzac Day match. Yes it gets noted, but they dont seem to make a song and dance about it. Its more of a footnote.

I would put it down to the A-League being still a young competition and they want to celebrate any achievements they get as much as possible. And let everyone know about it!

No question the NBL would do the same too if it got expectional crowds, but I just don't see why the A-League needs to constantly hammer in the point that soccer is booming every time they have a good round - which is often.

I think it hurts basketball as well, MACDUB.

International competition in basketball is pretty much pointless, no one watches it except for hardcore fans.

You mean in Australia?

Well, then explain this one for me please? Aus v Pak in the cricket is being played in Dubai or some place.

Absolutely not one fan of either country in the stands.

Massive state of the art stadium, TV coverage to die for, cricket shows during lunch and tea breaks, highlights, radio all over it and interviews with cricket super stars from yesteryear.

Not one person there to provide any kind of atmosphere whatsoever and we talk about the demise of cricket in some forms (West Indies cancel a tour to India and will lose Millions of $$$ because of this), yet the money they appear to have and the publicity of that sport compared with basketball here is ridiculous!!

WTF???

Sorry for the rant, my point is that who cares about such a series played in no mans land while the NBL is being played here?

Mr Packer, who else/??

Bear, you completely underestimate the role of cricket in the national psyche, both here and in Pakistan (and elsewhere).

I doubt it would have rated well, but the tv production is being paid for by Pakistan interests, with an international commentary team.

There would be an uproar if it was not telecast.

And of course there are no fans, they are playing in a neutral venue thanks to the instability in Pakistan. That does not mean Pakistan is not interested.

It's also part of a bigger picture, that is complete coverage of a sport that is massive in summer here. Broadcasters will cop some bad to get the very popular.

The A-League got its foot in the door thanks to the interest of the Socceroos. Unfortunately basketball hasn't found anything that captures the imagination for quite some time that covers for the quieter times.

Thanks HO, I do get the cultural bind we have with the bat and the ball, I played for years and actually love the game.

I tried to watch it on TV, but without that crowd atmosphere and to be honest even the commentators couldn't get excited about it, I found myself turning the chanel over, just couldn't get into it.

I am sure many did like it, but I just don't get the reason they play in places where no one watches, then they get all this great coverage, but it's so bloody boring!

We beef up our game to make it exciting, it only goes for 2 hours and we can't get anyone outside in the general media to drive it, just a shame that's all...