The Southern Huskies Consortium led by Justin Hickey and business partner Mike Sutton will shortly announce their entrance into the NZ NBL.
It’s believed current Chargers Coach Anthony Stewart will be named coach of the team and keeping with their “southern” branding the team is set to announce that they have signed some of the young talent currently playing for NBL franchises in Australia’s southern cities ie. Adelaide and Melbourne and plan on making roster announcements this week.
The team is expected to add some of the best young players from the NBL and add them to the core playing group of the Hobart Chargers 2018 SEABL Championship team, including import Tre Nichols and Mathiang Mou.
The Huskies already have plans to take advantage of the cross-tasman rivalries that playing in the NZNBL provides, with an ANZAC Day game planned which would see Tasmania host some of the toughest basketball competition from New Zealand in a game which commemorates the Australians and New Zealanders who served and died in service of both countries.
In a move aimed at uniting basketball in Tasmania, the Huskies will also play their home games out of venues in both Launceston and Hobart, with five games planned for Launceston and four for Hobart.
Both the Huskies and NZ Basketball are deep in negotiations and have been ever since the Huskies Consortium bid to purchase the Derwent Entertainment Centre (DEC) was refused by the Glenorchy Council.
The Huskies will utilise the Silverdome in the north of the state with a venue to be decided in the South. Although the DEC would seem to be the logical choice for the team, recently negotiations for the sale of the venue came to a bitter end and it is not yet known how the arrangement will work.
The Council rejected the bid for the DEC describing it as “totally inadequate” The council will not reveal the amount Mr Hickey’s HydraPlay consortium offered for the venue, but said in a statement it was “well short of what was considered acceptable for such a significant public asset”. The council will now run a public expressions of interest process to seek buyers for the DEC.
“It is in the best interest of the community that we test the open market in trying to attract an acceptable offer,” Alderman Johnston said.
Mr Sutton said he would talk with his partners about whether they wanted to get involved in the public tender process. “Unless they [the Council] can really change the way they behave, that’s a pointless exercise before it starts,” he said.
Hickey has also said that his consortium would not rebid on the DEC and would instead look at options involving the purchase of land and the construction of their own venue and entertainment precinct.
The DEC has suffered losses of a million dollars in the past two years.
The deal is expected to be announced as a multiyear agreement with the NZ NBL and to assist with travel costs, the Huskies will play double headers in NZ, thus limiting their flights across the Tasman.
The team plans one fielding a successful team in the NZ NBL in 2019 and then leveraging that success to “force” the NBL’s hand and include them in the Australian National League.
The NZ NBL which was formed in 1982 and currently consists of eight teams based in Auckland, Christchurch, Invercargill, Napier, Nelson, New Plymouth, Palmerston North and Wellington. The season runs from early April until the end of July.
Numerous current Australian NBL players play in the NZ league and it is expected that several will be willing to play for the Tasmanian based side.
The Hickey led consortium is breaking new grounds and the foresight, energy and willingness to branch out in the NZ NBL could change the basketball landscape.
In previous years NBL teams have investigated playing year round, Adelaide and Perth both publicly looked into playing in different Asian leagues during the NBL off-season to keep players sharp and provide year round revenue to the clubs and their employees.
This major shift in thinking for Tasmanian basketball could be one which see’s other NBL teams, most obviously Adelaide and Melbourne due to travel costs, enter development teams or their NBL rosters minus imports into the growing league and shift professional basketball in Australia to a year round sport.
One can only think that the Glenorchy Council will be ruing their decision not to sell the DEC and become a part of what is sure to be a successful and long lasting project.
Dan Boyce is a die-hard Sydney Kings fan who grew up in Melbourne during the roaring 90's of Australian Basketball and spent far too much time collecting Futera NBL Basketball cards.
