It didn’t take long for Larry Kestelman to dunk on a set of mutinous plans to force him out of the National Basketball League, a putsch led by American billionaire Jared Novelly, owner of the Illawarra Hawks and Donald Trump’s recent pick for US ambassador to New Zealand.
“We remain fully committed to the continued and unprecedented growth and success of the NBL,” Kestelman said on Friday.
“The NBL is not for sale.” And that was it. A two-line statement coolly dispatching Novelly’s MAGA-like coup.
Granted, there’d been a morning of crisis talks with the club owners.
Tesla’s Robyn Denholm, owner of the Sydney Kings, implored everyone to stay calm and to avoid any briefings of the press, communicating this injunction from America, where she’s been wrangling Elon Musk, the troll-in-chief busy dismembering what’s left of the Tesla brand – when the vehicles aren’t falling apart on their own.
Kestelman’s two-line swatting of Novelly isn’t likely to deter this litigious son-of-an-oil-tycoon from waging war over control of the league, as he’s already promised. And he’s well acquainted with the finer workings of Australia’s legal system, don’t you worry.
Novelly had been in Sydney just a few months when he decided to take his landlady to court over a dispute with his CBD penthouse. The home theatre had too few seats – a measly two chairs, instead of seven – and the self-cleaning Japanese toilet he requested, costing $28,000, hadn’t been installed, either.
So of course we believe Novelly when he says he’s going to file “multiple actions” against the NBL if a deal isn’t “peacefully” hashed out by the end of the month. We know he’s a man who will stand his ground. He literally went to battle over a crapper.
But the problem for Novelly is that he’s mounting this campaign on a series of strange suppositions about governance of the NBL, claiming that Kestelman is engaging in a lopsided distribution of profits to each of the clubs, that his private companies have made “significant profit” from NBL-related activities, and that Kestelman himself isn’t sharing these spoils with the teams.
To backstop these suspicions, Novelly rallied a cohort of collaborators from each of the clubs and off they went to commission a confidential KPMG audit of the league.
For three months the firm’s accountants rifled through the NBL’s accounts and reviewed every transaction going back three years. They interviewed Kestelman and senior leadership figures like CEO David Stevenson and CFO Robert Rink, delivering their report to Novelly and the rest of the club owners on February 28.
And Novelly would have you think the report is brimming with evidence of greed and skulduggery at the very top of the NBL. He said so in his email on Thursday, citing the report as a critical factor in his intention to take over the league from the villainous, profiteering Kestelman.
Except the report actually found the exact opposite – it says so twice on the first page, in bold, amid the rest of the executive summary.
“No significant issues were noted from the 8 scope areas considered,” it says. “There were no significant negative variances noted between payments made to the clubs and our recalculation work performed.”
What the report does reveal, however, is that net profit for FY24 was $6.05m, slightly lower than the $6.4m achieved in FY23 and $6.75m in FY22. From that profit figure, about $1.48m was distributed back to each of the 10 clubs, or roughly $148,484, amounting to a contractually agreed 24.5 per cent of earnings.
Except instead of receiving $148,484, the teams all ended up being paid $200,000, because it turns out the ghouls in charge of the NBL, as the report noted, decided to round up the figure as a gesture of “continued commitment to assisting clubs with financial support”. Greedy bastards.
Just zoom out from the NBL to get a hint of Novelly’s motivations. He’s one of the largest shareholders in the East Asian basketball league, or EASL, and were he to manage a takeover of the NBL he would almost certainly control all professional basketball competition across the Asia-Pacific.
We think that’s his play, and we’re sensing Kestelman is unlikely to cave in so easily to Novelly’s demands. After all, this isn’t a war over the fit-out of a CBD penthouse. And there’s much more at stake than just a toilet.
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