Australia’s number one international team sport: basketball

The NBL has also benefited from involvement by former NBA players, as illustrated by Andrew Bogut returning to play for the for the Sydney Kings through a deal that reportedly included a potential 10% stake in the franchise.

With the NBL continuing to grow as a world-class product, with the NBL owner Larry Kestleman selling his stake in the Melbourne United for approximately $10 million during 2018, investment into NBL teams has come from present and former NBA players including Dante Exum, Al Harrington, Josh Childress, Zach Randolph, Shaun Marion and Matt Walsh.

Most promising for the NBL’s future was Kestelman’s introduction of the Next Stars program which took advantage of the NBA’s existing rule that a player cannot be drafted within one year of leaving high school, and must turn 19 before or during his draft year, a stance which usually meant playing at least one season in the US college system.

As Bogut indicated in 2018, offering such players $100,000 to spend that year playing a season in Australia was an attractive option for players given he himself had to “get a part-time job when I was an All-American in my sophomore year” by working in a sports bar on Friday nights and Saturday nights “just to be able to pay my rent, be able to eat”.

With Terrance Ferguson being the initial prototype of the Next Stars program playing for the Adelaide 36ers in the 2016-17 season before being taken by the Oklahoma City Thunder as pick 21 in the first round of the 2017 NBA Draft, the program has delivered a number of quality players to the NBA via the NBL.

They include Roderick "R. J." Hampton, who played for the New Zealand Breakers, and was later drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks as the 24th pick in the 2020 NBA draft before being traded to the Denver Nuggets.

And LaMelo Ball, the 18 year old younger brother to New Orleans Pelicans star Lonzo, who was later selected by the Charlotte Hornets as the 3^rd overall pick of the 2020 NBA draft.

As a result of Ball’s popularity alone, with Ball having five million followers on Instagram, the NBL brand went global through news, television, magazines, online forums and social media.

Ball’s triple double against Cairns enjoyed over 10 million views worldwide, and the New Zealand and Illawarra match was watched by more than two million fans on the NBL Facebook page in the US, the most watched NBL game in history.   

NBL exposure to the world, boosted by the NBL’s deal with social media giant Facebook’s Watch platform to live stream selected games in the US, Australia and New Zealand during the 2019/20 season, was also boosted by the NBL’s global streaming deal with Amazon-owned platform Twitch which allowed all NBL games live streamed around the world on the league’s official Twitch channel.

Ball would also help attract a record NBL crowd of over 17,500 people to the Illawarra Hawks versus Sydney Kings match in Sydney, at a time when live NBL matches were being aired in 33 countries in some form.

But the future of the NBL now faces greater competition as the NBA provided a massive salary increase from 2020 through its G League which could pay elite prospects $500,000-plus and provide a one-year development program outside of the minor league's traditional team structure.