Australian Basketball History

The National Basketball League of Australia has seen many great local and imported talents play on our courts. NBL has been a launch pad for some of the great players in the NBA. However, this was not always the case.

Australia is a very young country and its first Basketball Association was founded was the Metropolitan Basketball Association of South Australia in 1936. She joined the NSW Basketball Association in 1938 following a great effort by Jack Small and Eric Callaway. Australia's Amateur Basketball Union was formed in 1939, which was the culmination of the Victorian Basketball Associations and NSW. ABU would be the forerunner of the Australian Basketball Association.

Basketball in Australia was played in small suburban stadiums where only a few hundred people were present to support the players. In fact, the first Australian National Men’s Championship was first played in 1946 in Sydney. NSW defeated Victoria 50-44! That same year, Basketball Queensland was established: the big game began to spread. It wasn't long after Australia, in 1948, became the 52nd affiliate of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA).

The women's competition took a little longer to strengthen, with the first Australian women's national championship in 1955. South Australia defeated NSW 50-34 in the final! Unfortunately, only the men's team participated in 1956 when Australia hosted the Olympic Games. The Boomers ended up in 12th place. The women's competition was strengthened and the Australian women's team took part in the first World Cup in Brazil in 1957. In addition, the 1957 Australian men's national team participated for the first time in the FIBA ​​World Cup in Yugoslavia and finished in 12th place.

In 1978, John Raschke, the then president of New South Wales Basketball, wanted to formulate a national professional competition that would help the development of basketball across Australia. He joined ten interested parties in an unused aircraft hangar at Sydney airport to discuss the creation of a national competition. In the first NBL season of 1979, St Kilda Saints, Nunawading Specters, West Adelaide Bearcats, Wollongong Hawks, City of Sydney Astronauts, Newcastle Falcons, Canberra Cannons, Bankstown Bruins, Glenelg Tigers were played with each other. This year, he also saw the 3-point shot introduced in the game by the NBA forum (which was subsequently adopted by the FIBA ​​in 1984).

The women's competition was not far behind the men's competition with the competition at the Interstate Women's Basketball Conference that started in 1981: this would be the predecessor of the WNBL. The Australian women's team participated in their first Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984, finishing in a very respectable fifth. It goes on for a few years, until 1996, and the Opals won the first Olympic basketball medal in Australia with a bronze at the Barcelona Olympic Games. Opals stood again at the Sydney Olympics and won a silver medal in 2000. This is our best result to date: a men's Olympic medal is still slipping away from us.

Wheelchair basketball in Australia has a strong competition, both locally and internationally. Our two Australian teams, women, glider and men, rollers, have been successful in the last Paralympic Games where we brought home bronze and gold medals respectively.

Basketball has one of the highest participation rates for team sports in Australia. It seems that our number is growing every year, with more and more Australians enjoying the competition and social activity it brings. Today, we can expect to see more than 750,000 spectators in the matches of the NBL summer season, with a large number of followers watching digital and pay-TV channels.