07 May Maximising Exposure

Well what a great start to the Badaball subscription site – a conciliatory interview with the man who made the headlines (in the North East at least) for the wrong reasons at the BBL Finals – Steve Leven.

Sure words needed to be said after Eagles semi-final exit just not to the nearest journalist eh Steve!

 Plus an excellent panel podcast, with the three Wisemen: Dave Forrester, Pete Jacques and Karl Southern.

 A good quality, competitive final live on TV was just the ticket to cap a resurgent BBL season but the Wisemen seemed to think that the Finals Weekend had been a bit of a flat occasion. Dave F also raised the point that the national media continues to be a tough nut for the BBL to crack.

 In my view, three major finals in four months is perhaps one too many and does the season really need to stretch into May?

 Know of course the league is restricted by venue costs and availability for its central events but on the media front do think that going forward the BBL will have to take a sharper look at what they will be up against.

This year the Finals were competing with the penultimate weekend of the Premiership, the final weekend of the Championship (now of course Europe’s 4th biggest sports league in terms of attendance) plus the World Snooker Final and Rugby League’s Millennium Magic.

This meant that it wasn’t exactly a weekend where sports editors were scratching around for copy.

It is no co-incidence that the Trophy Final received far more press coverage on a quieter weekend for British sport.

Next year the date for the BBL Play-Off final should be Sunday 29 March. Why?

The following week is reserved for football World Cup qualifiers including England’s home game against Ukraine.

That weekend will be dead for football – no Premiership, very few Championship games and although the Six Nations is in progress there are no fixtures on the Sunday.

So that Sunday is as blank as you will get in the congested British sports calendar, certainly no Super Sunday and probably not even a Ski Sunday.

If the BBL wants to get the national press interested they have give themselves a chance with their scheduling.

But what about that chunk of the season that you will miss by ending a month early – as we know that BBL clubs are not in favour of cutting back on fixtures.

Well my solution would be to play the Trophy first up and get it started in mid-September straight after the GB games.

Those qualifiers will be as high profile as basketball gets on this island and the BBL wants to make sure it rides on the GB teams’ coattails.

Sure the Trophy will be a touch diminished, becoming almost a pre-season tournament but is that a bad thing. A chance for clubs to bed in new players and work on plays before the real meat – the Championship – arrives.

Plus what better way to usher in the season proper than a BBL Trophy Final Four weekend in October where you can grant the British Hoops press-pack access all areas. At that stage of the season everyone just wants to see their team play as much as possible, so even a 3rd/4th place play-off game no longer seems such a waste of time.