Basketball On The Internet.

PRETTY sure it has been established the NBL, as it continues to exist and lurch from crisis to crisis roughly every two-three years, just isn't sustainable in its current form.

Sure, you will hear some claim otherwise, but the evidence is irrefutable.

Naismith bless the many, many men (and some women) who have dipped into their own monies for so long to help grow and sustain our game.

But with few exceptions, they eventually find the frustrations of tail-chasing and not progressing to the attainable rank of being the major "minor" sport, too much to stick around.

The NBL presents a great product and, right now, the on-court evidence is exciting and captivating.

So why, apart from NEVER learning from mistakes of the past and regularly reinventing the wheel, hasn't the league moved to a sustainable model?

It's not as if there aren't any alternatives available.

Immediate past league CEO Fraser Neill had this vision - the NBL becomes a "television sport" where being on the box becomes the first priority.

It was going to work something like this (and this is just a hypothetical rendering):

EVERY NBL game is shown on live television, with the league seeking a FTA deal in concert with a deal on Foxsport. Other sports achieve this so why not ours?

7-Mate, GO and even SBS were FTA names I'd heard in dispatches. But the FTA network is irrelevant here beyond the fact it would show games live, again, in conjunction with Fox.

So Monday night becomes the night for NBL ball in Townsville. Monday Night Basketball is a Crocodiles home game and steadily the folks there adjust to that.

Tuesday is home game night in Wollongong, and Wednesday is home game time in Cairns.

Thursday is Auckland, with bigger market teams such as Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney at home on Friday, Saturday and Sundays.

The key to Fraser's vision was that with every game on TV, clubs could sell guaranteed advertising space to sponsors so the size of their venues now became less important.

That was one of the reasons the proposed bid out of Tasmania had legs because the new Tassie team would represent and unify the state.

It could play home games in Hobart, Launceston, Devonport, Burnie etcetera and a state could galvanise behind it. The size of the venues now became irrelevant because the league was being driven by being a TV product.

Expansion became viable and also meant a Tassie team would be allocated a designated "home game night", as might a new outfit in Brisbane.

Of course, if you're pulling many thousands of fans to your games currently, you may not want to surrender that potential revenue or have your TV product looking as it might at a Townsville RSL Stadium as opposed to a Townsville Entertainment Centre, to use an obvious contrast.

That was Fraser's vision, at least in part, that TV-generated revenue would drive sustainability.

Notice since that model was shelved, so has any mention of the Tassie bid, which had State Government support.

MELBOURNE United majority owner Larry Kestelman put up a proposal to run the league, as he could see commercial possibilities in it.

Wow. Someone who could see the NBL as commercially successful?

How many business folk have we had come into our game who saw or said that?

Count them on one finger. Unfortunately Larry's vision, which included links into Asia, required him to own 51 per cent of the league and to run it as a commissioner.

You can understand why some owners, pumping big bucks into their teams, baulked at that.

If Larry had only gone for 50 per cent, he might have got it across the line.

Again, most monied people coming into the NBL are told "expect to lose money" so when Larry says he sees commercial strength in the game, it again looks like an opportunity lost.

So we have Fraser's plan, Larry's proposal and Andrew's idea.

THE latter is the course seven-time NBL MVP Andrew Gaze publicly has championed before - that the NBL reverts to a SEABL-style competition which is, after all, how it began.

If that is what the marketplace today can accommodate then why not revert back to sustainable clubs and build again, but this time slowly and steadily?

Back in the day when the NBL started that way, the quality of imports was amazing.

Names such as Richo, Rocky, Leapin' Leroy, Black Pearl, JC, Herb and Bennie rocked, playing alongside our great Aussie part-timers.

NO, he doesn't need a caption... And neither do the guys below, if you know your NBL.

That's where Andrew came in, back in 1984 when the NBL largely was a club and association-driven competition.

It is very do-able, as the SEABL has proven.

If you're of the mindset that's a retrograde step, what about returning basketball to winter and playing midweek instead of weekends?

Let's see all those AFL and NRL players who love basketball back out attending our games, just as our players follow theirs.

We don't have to be in opposition. We can happily co-exist ... and we're still indoors.

How good would it also be if the NBL played on nights on which juniors could attend?

Wiser heads than mine need to work out the best course but there has to be a better one than what we have now.

You can find SEABL games on live streaming. You get TV interviews and games on the box in parts of the QBL.

Less than a week ago we had the annual Australian Under-20 States Championship.

Victoria beat Tasmania in a superlative game of basketball for the Championship.

We have great kids popping up everywhere. But if you looked around the stands at Dandenong Stadium, you would have seen more AFL recruiters watching and taking notes than NBL coaches.

We are going to struggle to hang onto our burgeoning young talent, and that is especially so while we have a national league that is run by people with little or no passion for the game, even less foresight and with clubs too ambivalent to stand up when they know what is going on is wrong.

The governance of our sport, at almost every level, is lamentable - and I apologise to any of the thousands of genuinely hard-working volunteers across every basketball stadium in the country who I exclude in that assessment anyway.

Volunteers are our lifeblood. They have the passion to be there because they just love it. No pay day. No pay off. And often no recognition either. But that's not why they're there.

They're there, again, because they love it. Naismith bless them.

They're worth listening to as well because they do care and often have been around long enough to know and recognise the wrong turns we continually make as a sport BEFORE we make them, again.

Until we get the governance right, we are destined to continue chasing our tail as a sport at an elite level.

For example, how absurd was it that BA retained the IP for the Brisbane Bullets when the NBL demerged?

If it was, indeed, "simply an oversight" as many in the know have claimed, then what stops the federation from doing the right thing and handing it across, as it should have when the NBL demerged in 2013?

Maybe there's a buck in it for BA now. Who cares if it costs the NBL a team in Brisbane?

Where does thinking like that begin and how can it continue?

Certainly not with a single soul who cares about THE GAME.

Right now there's a big question-mark over BA's support of this country's elite men's competition just as there is a question-mark over whether the NBL's current governance methodology is any better than when the league was run by BA?

We might be "the great unwashed" out here, but we're not stupid.

Back to the point. The NBL is not sustainable as it exists. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

There are many potential different ways to go.

Change is scary, for sure.

Not having an NBL is scarier.