Basketball On The Internet.

STRONG word out of the South East Australian Basketball League is plans to shelter under the Basketball Australia umbrella are close to dead in the water as clubs decide they'd rather be singing in the rain.

At least that's the (e)mail I'm getting.

Not sure whether SEABL teams privately have been revisiting the relative merits of such a proposal or merely admiring the magnificent job of marketing and promotion BA has been doing so far this year with its sole elite league, the WNBL.

Who knows? Maybe SEABL clubs just aren't as excited about the prospect of having BA shut down live streaming of games - in the manner the Canberra Capitals' live streams were shut down - as the WNBL was.

Either way, I'm hearing the December 7 meeting when resolution was on the table may now be a crisis confrontation for BA with the oldest, most successful interstate basketball competition in this country recognising itself to be just that.

I'm even hearing BA chief exec Kristina Keneally now won't even be attending the meeting on the 7th, with BA chairman Scott Derwin and the federation's big gun Andrew Gaze fighting a lone battle.

"Given Scott has clashed heavily with SEABL management in the past, not sure he will be able to recruit any clubs to the BA side of the table," an extremely reliable SEABL source sent me.

"Rumour has it a life member of BA and SEABL will also attend the meeting to ensure that SEABL does not get screwed."

Sounds as though SEABL has seen the light. Maybe it made sense when SEABL was being touted as the "underpinning (ugh) league" for the NBL but that became irrelevant when that league demerged.

Make no mistake, re-entering AIS teams in the SEABL next year is a good and logical step for BA.

No calls please. We all know they are now the BA "Centre of Excellence" teams, another fabulously wanky name we can all sigh and just learn to live with.

(I mean, who thinks up names such as "Emerging Boomers" when Youth Boomers would have sufficed? Or "Centre of Excellence" when National Basketball Academy would have told it better. And hey, "I'm off to the NBA" sounds way sweeter than "I'm off to the Centre of Excellence."

CoE teams will compete on a reduced fixture in 2014, similar to when the AIS last participated in SEABL in 2010. CoE teams will play every opponent once, either home or away with wins and losses not counting toward playoff participation.

That being the case, why not call CoE games part of the SEABL "non-Conference" schedule? Or do we want to avoid sounding like basketball?

That's one to put to our Emerging Administrators at the Centre of Just Slightly Less Than Impressive.