Basketball On The Internet.

LUKE Schenscher always struck me as the perfect choice for an Adelaide 36ers captain - had he stayed after his debut season.

He is local, he is 216cm, he has red hair and he is someone you can look up to, figuratively and literally.

It was always a great disappointment in Adelaide that circumstances squeezed him out of a return but he did OK for himself, winning a championship in Perth, then an MVP award in Townsville before last season's injury-interrupted season with the Crocs.

It is great to get him home and it also is testament to him that his over-riding reason for returning was to help drag the club he grew up supporting out of its mire of recent times.

That's captaincy material.

That said, in a Sixers line-up likely to finish up being Schensch, DJ Johnson, Anthony Petrie, Adam Gibson, Nathan Crosswell, Jason Cadee, Mitch Creek, Stephen Weigh, CJ Massingale and Pero Vasiljevic - though the last two are, as yet, unconfirmed - today's co-captaincy announcement was no great surprise.

Personally, I've never been a big fan of co-captains or "leadership groups." It sounds like a lot of wank to me, frankly.

Pick your captain, pick your vice-captain, then recognise too that senior, experienced vets have something very worthwhile to offer. End of story.

The 36ers last picked co-captains in 1988 with Peter Ali and Darryl Pearce sharing the leadership role under Gary Fox. On the quiet, neither of them was overly thrilled with that. They thought Foxy chose a soft option.

Trust me, that would be different with this season's co-captains, Nathan Crosswell and Adam Gibson.

I understand where coaches like backcourt players to fill the captaincy role and in the 36ers' case, with Crosswell being vice-captain last season and Gibbo new, the logic is obvious for the joint captaincy.

Crossy gives nice continuity, Gibbo an eye to the future.

Me, I would just have made Gibbo captain and had Crossy retain the vice-captaincy.

To also have Anthony Petrie as vice-captain speaks greatly to how much of a good impression he has made and what he brings.

But, truly, why bother?

As I said, he already falls into that category of older guy who brings great experience. When he speaks, people will listen, just as they will when Luke speaks, or Stevie Weigh speaks.

Sure, the vice-captain title is vindication but does he need it?

There's only 10 people on a playing roster. Do we need co-captains, a vice-captain, an executive captain, an assistant captain, a senior executive captain, deputy captain and assistant deputy captain to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy?

Guess I am just old-fashioned.

JUST in case you were wondering, the 36ers formally signed the lease to play at Adelaide Arena for the 2012-13 iiNet NBL Championship today.

OOPS. I slouch corrected. The Taipans did get a nice hit in the Cairns Post on Saturday for the announcement of new import Shane Edwards, contrary to my earlier information.

Shows you can never trust a newspaper when it doesn't put all of its content up online.

That's if you believe what you read anyway. I sure don't.

NOT sure asking adults to pay $12 for the State League grand finals at Adelaide Arena tomorrow night was particularly sharp thinking.

That's more than double what supporters are used to paying and while you can make the case fans will get two grand finals, they get two games at all double-header fixtures as it is.

Plus, they see their own team.

It's a Norwood-North women's final and a Sturt-Forestville men's play-off so that's four sets of fans.

But they will only be interested in their own game.

Rather than swell the crowd, the price is likely to hit it.

Advertising a gold coin admission might have made more sense.

Expect both games to be crackers though as there is precious little love lost in those rivalries.

OF course I like the look of the new Los Angeles Lakers, thank you for asking.

But, frankly, with Steve Nash and Dwight Howard in and Andrew Bynum out, I personally would like to also have seen Metta World Peace moved on as well.

A vibrant new three-man alongside Nash, Kobe, Pau Gasol and Dwight would have made more sense to me because Metta, while he can be great, is also a loose cannon.

That hit to OKC's James Harden last season was not only unwarranted but very disturbing.

No, I do not see Metta as this era's Dennis Rodman, who also had a tendency to go off, once in a while.

Rodman's antics never derailed Chicago and he always delivered.

World Peace - what a classic misnomer - not only derails the Lakers with his occasional lapses, he often under-achieves.

Worse, there's almost something sinister or malevolent and dangerous to him.

Yeah, I can remember Rodman being found in his vehicle in a carpark with a shotgun back in the day.

The difference is, I don't expect he would have used it.

World Peace could be the one intangible which harms the Lakers, going forward.

I still like OKC as the team for the future, but Kendrick Perkins is a $7million waste-of-space and the fact they didn't upgrade in the middle could come back to bite them.

STILL with the Lakers and finally the club has erected a statue of the great Kareem Abdul Jabbar outside Staples Centre.

As a longtime fan of his trademark skyhook and on-court demeanor, I can only say this was a little overdue.

NOT sure it is an official basketball term worldwide but it should be in Australia.

I refer, of course, to the "Andrew Gaze defence" which, I believe, should become a part of our lexicon.

It should be used as follows. When you are asked, can so-and-so play any D (and so-and-so is a shooter, not a fighter) feel free to say: "He plays 'Andrew Gaze defence'. You know, where his man scores 30 but he scores 45."

GOT a call from an old friend, we used to be real close...

So in case you were curious (and I was), former North Melbourne Giants championship coach and one-time Brizzy Bullets boss, Bruce Palmer, is now technical director of the Dongguan Basketball School (NBA) in China and doing an impressive job, by all accounts.

Yes, his longtime buddy Brian Goorjian coaches Dongguan in the Chinese Basketball Association.

A HORSE, a donkey and a zebra walk into a bar.

The barman looks up from where he is cleaning glasses, stares at them and says: "What is this? Some kind of joke?"