Newest NBL club South East Melbourne Phoenix reveals the secret to its success

With Tasmania in line to grab the next NBL licence, the league’s newest team has revealed the one area where any prospective club must focus to succeed.

Tip-off during the NBL game between the South East Melbourne Phoenix and the Adelaide 36ers at Melbourne Arena last week. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty

HAVING facilitated the stunning entry of South East Melbourne Phoenix into the NBL, general manager Tommy Greer believes there is one major obstacle for Tasmania’s potential re-entry into the league.

The Phoenix became the competition’s ninth franchise this season and held a 5-2 record through their first seven games — the best ever start from an expansion side.

League owner Larry Kestelman, who has put the 10th licence on the table for a Tasmanian team, is awaiting an answer from the State Government on whether it will pitch in somewhere in the vicinity of $20 million to upgrade the Derwent Entertainment Centre.

If Kestelman and the Government can strike an agreement it would see the state represented in the NBL for the first time since the Devils folded in 1996, and two-time Melbourne Tigers champion Greer said the biggest challenge the Phoenix encountered would likely be one a Tasmanian outfit must conquer.

South East Melbourne general manager Tommy Greer. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images for the NBL

“The South-East Melbourne community is very basketball savvy, they’ve seen teams come and go many times before,” Greer said in an interview with the Mercury.

“They’ve been sold a lot of different stories, so I think the most difficult thing immediately was getting that trust and getting that buy-in and sort of not convincing, but showing the South-East public … what we’re about and the fact we were going to live by our principles and the fact we’re going to deliver on what we said.

“Also the fact that we’re not going to be a fly-by-night situation, we’re here for the long haul and we want to represent that community for a long period of time, unlike some of the fallen clubs of the past.

“I’m not as in tune with the basketball public in Tassie as I am here in Victoria but I think with most franchises where clubs have been before, that’s a pretty big concern.

“My message for that would be look at what we tried to do.

“Community was such a big focus for us, and we didn’t want to just be a part of the community, we wanted to really embed ourselves in it.

“The way we went about that was not running away, trying to be something that we’re not. We made sure that we didn’t over-promise and under-deliver.

“We understand that there’s a steady build involved here and over the course of the next sort of three, four years, we know that we can turn this into a bit of a juggernaut.”

Membership and crowd attendances have been well above South East Melbourne Phoenix expectations. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty

Greer said the club was blown away by the public support when the brand was launched, with membership targets and crowd attendance expectations smashed.

This is despite the addition of a second team to the Melbourne market to join powerhouse United.

“Melbourne United have done a fantastic job, they’ve had to hold this professional basketball landscape in Victoria together themselves for the last five or so years.

“They’ve done a terrific job of doing that. But I think there were a lot of the basketball public who were really crying out for a team like the Phoenix to resurrect.

“That was made really evident by the fact that the second we went on sale with memberships, we knocked that out of the park and went past any original targets in that department.”