Basketball On The Internet.

THE NBL should announce its new operations manager on Friday and then maybe it finally can confront the elephant in the room – the standard of the league’s officiating.

Albert Joseph, the refs boss through 2015-16, is a great guy to deal with but there’s no doubt the officiating went backwards last season while the game went forwards. That, and the fact you could see every game on TV, meant the comparisons between last season against the two after the official demerger from Basketball Australia were stark.

Joseph had no direct NBL officiating experience when he was appointed by then operations manager Bret Mactavish and interpretations not only varied from game-to-game, but regularly from referee-to-referee.

Back when the NBL demerged, it appointed Mal Cooper, Bill Mildenhall and Ray Hunt – three of our game’s greatest referees – to revamp the officiating and return the NBL to a more spectacular, higher-scoring competition.

There was quite the uproar when they started out at the 2013 Preseason Blitz Tournament and there was an initial foul fest while everyone adjusted to the new calling parameters.

Over the course of their two years in the job though, greater consistency steadily evolved and prevailed.

Why the new NBL last season saw fit to dispense with their collective services is a mystery.

Sure, they made a few referees unhappy by insisting on accountability and a few coaches equally unhappy their views weren’t always being taken as gospel.

But even with all that, everyone knew they were dealing with a team of Cooper-Mildenhall-Hunt, who all know and understand the game.

What they have to say, for the most part, has substance.

My (e)mail is Joseph has already stepped down from continuing in the role next season due to the pressures of a tough and difficult fulltime job he is very highly-valued in.

With the advent of more playing talent last season and the prospect for that to further blossom in 2016-17, one of the first jobs the new operations manager should be looking at is the officiating.

And he or she could do a lot worse than go “back to the future” with the three wise men who had the NBL pointed in the right direction not so long ago.

UNITED FRONT? Surely we don't want to see another year of such frustration.