Steve Deane: Step in the right direction to help national basket case

The national Basketball League's decision to kick the Auckland Stars out of this year's competition is a huge step in the right direction for the sport.

For years the national competition has lurched from crisis to crisis while its clubs have waged a continual war against insolvency. Despite the national body cycling through chief executives with monotonous regularity, strong leadership has been conspicuously absent.

Television coverage - the lifeblood of any professional sport - has been sporadic. Sponsors have come and mostly gone pretty darned quick.

Many of the league's clubs, which exist through a mixture of individual benevolence, contra "sponsorship" and gaming trust allocations, are perpetually on shaky ground.

Even so, much of the power in the sport seems to rest with these clubs. The sport, as a result, has been a total basket case.

Events such as last year's entertaining playoff series were quickly buried under avalanches of bad press.

It has to stop. Tuesday's decision to punt the Stars is the first sign that it might.

The Stars clearly feel hard done by, but they brought their fate upon themselves. Their failure to pay wage arrears to former player Dillon Boucher and coach Kenny Stone became public knowledge months ago.

The club had plenty of time to pay the debts, but failed to do so. It could also have declared the debts on its participation agreement, but again failed to do so.

That breach was what prompted a closer look at the club's books which found it was not solvent.

The Stars' problems have not been confined to financial issues. Just weeks before the season tips off, the club had no confirmed coach and just one contracted player on its books. That player, Hayden Allen, had wanted out for some time.

There must, then, have been grave concerns about the club's ability to field a competitive team.

So far, the Stars' defence seems to have been that they are no worse than many other clubs and are being picked on. Even if true, it's not much of a defence, given that it completely ignores the fact that the club brought this situation upon itself.

Owner Tab Baldwin's view that there are no serious problems with the club and what problems there are can be quickly remedied begs the question: if that were the case, why didn't he deal with the situation long ago?

The club's secondary defence, that league chairman Sam Rossiter-Stead is out to get them, is simply childish. The attacks on Rossiter-Stead have amounted to little more than character assassination.

One of Baldwin's charges is that Rossiter-Stead is not a basketball person. True enough. But why would a non-basketball person bear some kind of grudge against the Stars?

The fact he is a non-basketball person (whatever that means) is precisely why Rossiter-Stead is the right man for the job.

It was basketball people who had driven the league to its knees just over a year ago. There was no TV deal, no naming-rights sponsor and even some of the most successful clubs were pleading for bailouts.

When Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) opted to put the league's administration into independent hands, non-basketball people were precisely who it sought for the league board.

Rossiter-Stead and his board were installed with a charter to transform the league into a sound, successful entity. It is vital for the game that they succeed.

Sure, the Stars aren't the only team in the league with issues, but they have been at the centre of many recent dramas.

In 2008 the club was kicked out of the finals for not paying an instalment of its entry fee. But as soon as the Stars threatened legal action BBNZ folded and reinstated them.

The result was that nothing changed and two years later the league is still being afflicted by the same issues - unpaid bills and missed deadlines.

This time the league must stand firm. It's a huge shame for Auckland not to be represented in the national league, but if making an example of the Stars is the price that has to be paid for basketball cleaning up its act, then so be it.