Every club is struggling with attendance this year, but I think the issues vary a little from state to state.

In Sydney, they would face a lot of competition in the rugby (league, union, I have NFI). In Adelaide, I think we have a very passionate supporterbase but the issue is one of publicity.

Problems common to all teams relate to the league not having any FTA presence, working against a "second best" or "third tier" mindset where people just don't rate basketball.

One good thing: had a few people who asked me yesterday about the game on Wednesday night, saying they'd heard it was a great game, etc. I took some people along who hadn't really been to many games before, and you can't help but feel that a finish like that would have them telling a number of others about the experience.

I would like to see more of the game night experience presented to people in the media. So, rather than just the odd game photo, have some footage of the crowd going nuts, etc. Those player photos are good, but they just can't show the atmosphere you get with a few thousand people in a contained venue. The Sixers should be creating 800k-1.5MB videos of game highlights that fans can download, show to friends, or email on -- e.g. "this is what you missed on Wednesday night!" -- a volunteer could do it with a game DVD and a PC in exchange for tickets to seats that might've been empty anyway.

Isaac, I've thought that email/internet is something that the NBL hasn't even come close to realising the potential of. All these message boards. All those mailing lists of thousands that every NBL team, club and association has. For *relatively* little expense (in comparison to other mediums), with a guaranteed captured target market, there's a hell of a lot more that could and should be done. The NBL has to realise that in many ways it's found itself back at 'grassroots'. It's 1989 all over again. There is a very dedicated, hardcore support base that every team has. The 36ers, the Kings, every team. Those simply aren't growing - especially in the case of the Kings where despite all the success in the world, in a city that worships success, they can't get a single new backside onto those plush entertainment centre seats. Even the biggest brands in the world with the largest media and advertising budgets in the world have woken up to the fact that targeted online work brings far better results, for far less money, than scattered broad work in other media. It would take a far smarter mind than I to know how to harness that, but it's damn obvious that it should be harnessed. I'd be dropping something professional and smart into every inbox of every person on every mailing list from every team, club and association and media outlet every single week. And not just that, but I'd harness the power of groups like OzHoops. Several hundred fans absolutely dedicated to making it work, from all over the country, and in each NBL stadium each week there are hundreds, if not thousands more who are the same. Use it! We'd all be more than happy to "go forth and multiply" with the message, if they just had one...

FTA TV. It's not an acronym - it's the solution but why oh why, can't they do it? Even the WNBL has FTA TV!

Earnie, thanks for visiting Hoops SA. The NBL are on the cusp of having a 'message'. They need to grab "Live and amazing", destroy that PoS song and pathetic logo and throw some energy into it as a slogan. No one is jumping to their feet at the Dome when Farley ties the scores in the last minute thinking "wow, it is all fun", they're thinking "this is amazing".

They need to stop posting lame little photos on the NBL site and put up some big shots, bigger than the promos on the front of NBA/A-League/AFL -- really make them big. They're too timid.

Then start getting some video highlights and putting them up for download. It's like they're scared of bandwidth. If Sportal or AU hosting are killing them, set up NBLmedia.com.au and host it somewhere where b/w is cheap (you can get almost 5TB for a couple hundred dollars in the States) and get the action out to as many people as possible.

There would be almost 1,000,000 people in Adelaide who'd never been to the Dome, didn't know where it was, what happened inside, what the atmosphere was like and they're not going to know until you show them. Doing this should be standardised across the league.

didnt the nbl management say that when the Kings win the title that would increase the exposure of basketball??!!!

I don't know if they ever said that outright, but it certainly seemed as though that was the plan.

well that plan didnt seem to work very well did it??

You gotta remember that the sydney siders are still trapped rugby/afl premiership celebrations. They did win both.

How about the nbl using a slogan like 'hit the boards'or 'chairman/chairperson of the boards' and advertising all the online fan sites like this ozhoops and the club supporters discussion sites. (Simple links page)

Tshirts, bumper stickers with the slogan on the front and urls on the back given away at games could be good promotions.

Enhancing the sense of online community that already exists.

To minimise the band width on video grabs they may be able to support P2P (torrents). No copyright issues because they own the rights to the clips.