Basketball Australia's solution - the IBA | Thebigtip

For decades now the NBL has been a financial nightmare for all stakeholders involved in the sport. The solution to Basketball Australia's problems could be solved by going international.

With the world as small as it is in a technological sense, basketball fans in Australia are more likely to support an NBA team than they are an NBL team. The reasoning behind it is that the skill level and quality of the games and highlight reels are much better in the NBA. As a product, the NBL just cannot compete. And with the population size and financial power of the USA, it's understandable why.

Australia isn't the only country suffering a basketball problem, many countries unable to run a successful national league. With the increase in popularity of soccer and other football codes, basketball seems to be sidelined as a premier sport.

I would like to introduce you to the IBA, The International Basketball Association. Each country that qualifies fields a team of their top Basketball Athletes to compete against other countries in the same league. If they can, they can field more than one team but there would need to be a cap on how many teams a country can field.

Unlike contact sports, Basketball isn't as physically wearing on a player as the court is smaller, the contact lighter, and the game shorter. This provides teams with the opportunity to play more games in a season, with less recovery time between games and seasons. Another benefit of Basketball, is that similar to soccer, it is a completely universal game meaning that nearly every country plays and it is not considered native to any one country.

In a practical sense the League would function as follows:

- Let's assume the league has 40 teams. These teams are divided into two groups much like the NBA has their East and West Divisions. So until the playoff season every team is competing in a line up of 20 other teams. They all play each other over the course of the season, but to reduce the fatigue levels of travelling, teams play each other 3 times in the space of one week to minimise travel and maximise game time. As an example, when the Australian team is at home, they play 3 games in different locations around Australia so that everyone has a chance to support the team. At the end of the Home and Away season (which in theory last 20 weeks and consists of 60 games of basketball), the teams are ranked by points. 2 for a win, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loss. They also have a percentage score based on the number of points they've scored compared with the number they've had scored against them.

- At the end of the 20 week home and away season the top team of each division come together to enter into a playoff series. This is a 5 game series. The team that has the highest number of points at the end of their season gets to host the First final and therefore has the advantage of playing more home Finals than the other team. At the end we have an International Basketball Association Champion.

- As more countries come on board, instead of increasing the size of the divisions, you can simply create new divisions, so that you don't have to increase the number of games played by each team.

Financially this is a goldmine. The New York Jets and Knicks have the equivalent of the Australian population supporting them and therefore they have a seemingly unlimited amount of money which they in turn put into the development of up and coming players. In theory, if the entire of Australia had one or two teams to field in the IBA, they would be far more profitable than the NBL teams have been combined, because the quality will be better, the coverage will be better, more people will want to attend, watch and participate. That will generate more basketball money in Australia and in turn that money can be used to support up and coming players.

Essentially at the end of the day, the hope would be that the League becomes a type of World Cup competition every year, and countries support their teams and their teams put on a good performance for them in return.