Southland’s champagne product
Paddy Lewis
FIRSTLY, some figures.
The Los Angeles Lakers spend NZ$158 million on player salaries per year. Each NRL team is allowed to spend NZ$5.3 million on players. Anecdotally, the lowest salary bill in the Air New Zealand Cup is $800,000 (take a bow, Counties Manukau tightwads).
Also anecdotally, the mid-to-upper range bill for running an entire National Basketball League franchise in New Zealand falls somewhere around the $450,000 mark. That’s for everything – salaries, travel, accommodation, staff salaries, running costs and all the other stuff needed to play semi-pro basketball.
NBL teams get little to no financial assistance from the national body (which only announced an NBL sponsor the week before the competition kicked off), and can’t even rely on the national body to arrange TV coverage (which, oddly, was talked about before the competition started, but has disappeared off the radar since – perhaps the SKY bill hadn’t been paid).
With all that in mind, you would expect a less than polished product, with a gaggle of die-hard fans, and sausage sizzles to raise money to buy stuff.
That’s why I was surprised to find 1700 mad keen fans at Stadium Southland in Invercargill watching a game between the Southland Sharks and the Christchurch Cougars (did they give much thought to that name?) which defied the low-budget aspects of the league.
Basketball has a fantastic product – non-stop action, drama, thrills, something for the whole family, pathos, bathos, and slatherings of conflict (sounds a bit like a video shop). It has a universal appeal. In Southland, where the new franchise has been welcomed like a Lotto winner, the team is delivering a champagne product on a lemonade budget.
I was talking to a bloke after the game who had travelled from Wyndham (about 45 km from Invercargill) with his three year old. He said he had never seen such an exciting sport and the two of them would be coming to every home game. Even at Easter, with a range of things on around the province, the stadium was three-quarters full and noisier than an ADHD kindergarten.
Every fan I spoke to had been at the loss against Taranaki’s Mountainairs (who the hell thought of that silly name?) two nights previously, but had come back. They were fervent, helped in part by a franchise that has realised the need to build a family experience around music, entertainment, and sport that doesn’t involve a whole lot of spoilt personalities earning far more than they are worth in terms of spectator and sponsor value.
I’ll walk out of rugby games feeling as if I’ve spent 80 minutes doing little else other than watching a stop-start game, drinking overpriced beer, and getting a cold bum. As I left the Stadium on Saturday, I felt like I had experienced something really special.
Basketball New Zealand needs to be leveraging the excitement value in basketball. Southland, despite only having been in the league for seven games, could teach them a thing or two.
Ah yes, that try. No, not the one at the end that no-one other than Jonathan Kaplan could see. The one that came from Andy Ellis’s quick throw-in after Conrad Smith had clearly touched the ball.
Although the Hurricanes have done themselves no favours over recent weeks, one would expect three pairs of officious eyes could have picked up that misdemeanor. Or perhaps not.
It is becoming a fact of rugby that we shouldn’t expect too much from the officials when they are having to leave their seeing eye dogs in the changing sheds.
The Los Angeles Lakers spend NZ$158 million on player salaries per year. Each NRL team is allowed to spend NZ$5.3 million on players. Anecdotally, the lowest salary bill in the Air New Zealand Cup is $800,000 (take a bow, Counties Manukau tightwads).
Also anecdotally, the mid-to-upper range bill for running an entire National Basketball League franchise in New Zealand falls somewhere around the $450,000 mark. That’s for everything – salaries, travel, accommodation, staff salaries, running costs and all the other stuff needed to play semi-pro basketball.
NBL teams get little to no financial assistance from the national body (which only announced an NBL sponsor the week before the competition kicked off), and can’t even rely on the national body to arrange TV coverage (which, oddly, was talked about before the competition started, but has disappeared off the radar since – perhaps the SKY bill hadn’t been paid).
With all that in mind, you would expect a less than polished product, with a gaggle of die-hard fans, and sausage sizzles to raise money to buy stuff.
That’s why I was surprised to find 1700 mad keen fans at Stadium Southland in Invercargill watching a game between the Southland Sharks and the Christchurch Cougars (did they give much thought to that name?) which defied the low-budget aspects of the league.
Basketball has a fantastic product – non-stop action, drama, thrills, something for the whole family, pathos, bathos, and slatherings of conflict (sounds a bit like a video shop). It has a universal appeal. In Southland, where the new franchise has been welcomed like a Lotto winner, the team is delivering a champagne product on a lemonade budget.
I was talking to a bloke after the game who had travelled from Wyndham (about 45 km from Invercargill) with his three year old. He said he had never seen such an exciting sport and the two of them would be coming to every home game. Even at Easter, with a range of things on around the province, the stadium was three-quarters full and noisier than an ADHD kindergarten.
Every fan I spoke to had been at the loss against Taranaki’s Mountainairs (who the hell thought of that silly name?) two nights previously, but had come back. They were fervent, helped in part by a franchise that has realised the need to build a family experience around music, entertainment, and sport that doesn’t involve a whole lot of spoilt personalities earning far more than they are worth in terms of spectator and sponsor value.
I’ll walk out of rugby games feeling as if I’ve spent 80 minutes doing little else other than watching a stop-start game, drinking overpriced beer, and getting a cold bum. As I left the Stadium on Saturday, I felt like I had experienced something really special.
Basketball New Zealand needs to be leveraging the excitement value in basketball. Southland, despite only having been in the league for seven games, could teach them a thing or two.
Ah yes, that try. No, not the one at the end that no-one other than Jonathan Kaplan could see. The one that came from Andy Ellis’s quick throw-in after Conrad Smith had clearly touched the ball.
Although the Hurricanes have done themselves no favours over recent weeks, one would expect three pairs of officious eyes could have picked up that misdemeanor. Or perhaps not.
It is becoming a fact of rugby that we shouldn’t expect too much from the officials when they are having to leave their seeing eye dogs in the changing sheds.
Have Your Say
0 Comments
No comments.