Nine scores three-year basketball rights deal with NBL

Australian basketball continues its revival both on and off the court, securing a new broadcasting deal with Nine.

Hugh Hogland of Japan takes on Andrew Bogut of the Kings during a pre-season clash in Sydney. Picture: AAP

The nation’s basketball competition continues its revival both on and off the court, securing a new three-year broadcasting deal with Channel 9 owner Nine Entertainment.

The deal is characterised as a revenue-sharing arrangement, with an agreement to air two National Basketball League games per round on Nine multichannel 9GO! This bolsters Nine’s portfolio of sports that includes NRL, Australian Open tennis and netball. For NBL, which has eight teams and currently has a broadcast deal with Foxtel’s Fox Sports, a free-to-air deal has been a missing piece in its effort to became a national competition.

Nine Entertainment, which is in the midst of a $4 billion merger with Fairfax, believes the commercial deal inked with the NBL is the right model to help support and grow the national basketball competition.

For the NBL and millionaire owner Larry Kestelman it comes as the basketball league enjoys a strong renaissance after years of upheaval that included clubs going bankrupt and crowd numbers dwindling.

Mr Kestelman, who made his fortune in property and co-founded the Dodo internet and phone business, paid $7 million three years ago to take control of the NBL. He said yesterday the NBL had “been on a journey for three years” to now have almost sellout crowds.

“We have actually grown our attendance by over 50 per cent over that period to now get to the point where our total venues are actually breaking at capacity point. I think our actual average was close to 90 per cent of capacity across the venues so the people are back in droves,’’ Mr Kestelman told The Australian.

“We have rebuilt it as a real product of entertainment and as a product of basketball that is right up there on the world stage.”

The NBL enjoyed its biggest season to date in 2017-2018, with record crowd attendances and participation rates at a grassroots level, with the new TV deal to see the NBL become more accessible to fans across the country.

Helping drive the excitement is the recent arrival of champion player Andrew Bogut at the Sydney Kings. Melbourne-born Bogut was the No 1 NBA draft pick in 2005 in the US and is a former NBA champion with the Golden State Warriors.

Tom Malone, Nine’s director of sport, said he was thrilled to have basketball back on Nine and as part of the Wide World of Sports family.

“Larry and the team at NBL have done a terrific job rebuilding basketball in Australia, and securing some big names for the coming season — it will be great to see Andrew Bogut make his debut for the Sydney Kings,” he said.

The publicly listed Nine has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into sports broadcasting deals in the past few years, including its audacious bid to wrest the Australian Open tennis from traditional broadcaster Seven Network. That deal alone was reported to be worth up to $300m.

Mr Malone said the broadcasting of sporting codes made strong financial sense for a free-to-air station such as Nine.

“I think live sport still has the strong capacity to aggregate eyeballs in one place at one time, and that’s why live sport is so important to free-to-air,’’ he said.

The deal also covers digital rights and will include a live simulcast of the games aired on 9GO!, along with catch-up rights to all NBL games throughout the season following their conclusion, regardless of the network the game has aired on. The NBL 2018-19 season starts on October 11 on 9GO! and 9 Now.