Basketball: New club lifts baton from Heat and Stars

Photo / NZ Herald

Auckland will be represented in the 2011 national basketball league, with Basketball Auckland (BA) to fill the void created by the withdrawal of the Harbour Heat and the demise of the Auckland Stars.

Details of the new entity remain sketchy, with BA yet to confirm a match venue and still seeking a naming rights sponsor.

However, the association has posted adds on its own and Harbour Basketball's website calling for players to trial under former Stars coach Kenny Stone on the 11th and 18th of December.

BA general manager John McGregor said he hoped to make announcements on player recruitment and a venue next week and was optimistic sponsors would soon be brought on board.

With the Stars having folded in messy circumstances this year and the financially stricken Harbour association having suspended its participation for at least a season, there was a real prospect the country's largest metropolitan area would not be represented in the national league.

However, the decision by BA to enter a team has averted what would have been a major blow to the sport at domestic level.

"A competition isn't a [national] competition in any sport without an Auckland team, is it?" McGregor said.

With champions Wellington having confirmed their participation after belatedly attracting a major sponsor, 10 teams will contest the 2011 competition.

League chairman Sam Rossiter-Stead welcomed the return of an Auckland team a year after the Stars were suspended for breaches of the league's financial rules.

A Herald investigation into the Stars discovered the club had been struck off the companies register several months before its suspension, meaning it technically didn't exist. In a bizarre twist, owner Tab Baldwin had earlier changed the club's name to Bunch of Losers Ltd.

Those revelations spelled the end of the Stars, leaving Auckland without an NBL team.

Unlike the privately owned Stars, providing opportunities for aspiring local players would be a major focus of the new Auckland entity, McGregor said.

"In the past franchise owners and associations have not always had the closest of relationships," he said. "If we want to ensure our players have got a pathway and a future we need to provide them with that."

Rossiter-Stead welcomed the return of an Auckland team to the league: "We were disappointed not to have a team from Auckland in 2010 and have been working with Basketball Auckland since February to ensure that New Zealand's largest population is represented.

"Obviously it's very disappointing there is no team from North Harbour but, just as other teams have taken a year out in the past and come back stronger, we fully anticipate them rejoining the Bartercard NBL in 2012."

Harbour Basketball chief executive Trevor Johnston said the country's biggest association in terms of registered players would make a quick return to the league once it had "reconsolidated" its finances.

"It is obviously very, very disappointing, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But it is something that we had to do ... Funding has been very, very difficult to achieve."