FIBA 33: A boon or a curse for hoops?

When the first ever Youth Olympic Games (YOG) took place in Singapore earlier this year, there was no sign of a proper basketball tournament. I use "proper basketball" deliberately, because the tournament showcased the large scale debut of FIBA's latest brainchild, the FIBA 33.

Maybe I used correct the "latest brainchild" statement - after all, every ball player alive (no really, EVERY ball player alive) has played a less formalised version of FIBA 33. If you don't know, FIBA 33 is half-court basketball, played 3-on-3, first one to 33 in regulation time wins. Regulation time is just 10 minutes (with five minute halves), and if no team reaches 33, the one leading when time expires wins. Each team has three players plus one substitute. There is just a 10 second shot-clock, and like the international unspoken rules of basketball half-court play, if the defensive team gains possession of the ball, they have to first pass it outside the three-point arc before starting their offense.

It sounds suspiciously like every pick-up game ever played, except with referees and timers - plus I'm not sure if FIBA would be too hot on the Shirts vs. Skins idea.

Anyways, due to the fast-paced and exciting nature of the game, it was a roaring success at the YOG, capturing the largest (and loudest) crowds. Even India had a four-member squad present at the games - they failed to win any of their group games, but beat a couple of teams in the 17-20 classification to end at 18th spot.

The success prompted FIBA to discuss the format at the FIBA World Conference in Istanbul during the World Championships. Now, FIBA are hoping to take the 3-on-3 format to a bigger stage.

“We are all very excited about FIBA33, and in view of its popularity after just one day, it isn’t too far fetched to imagine it one day making it into the Olympics in its own right,” said FIBA Secretary-General Patrick Baumann.

Baumann has even said: "The US will always be able to have 12 players of the same quality which India would not be able to have. But India can have three, four or five players who can play three-on-three and they will be at the same level as the US"

FIBA president Bob Elphinston has added: "We want to use FIBA 33 to encourage more young girls and boys to play the game, to get started in basketball. We also want to create FIBA 33 as a separate discipline, not dissimilar to what we see at the Olympic Games with volleyball, in that we have beach volleyball and we have volleyball."

Is there anyone else here who thinks this new concept sounds a bit too familiar? Let's see, what is that one sport in India that involves a lot of players and goes on for five days? There is a one-day version of that sport, too, but it goes on for hours and hours. People love this sport in our country but the organisers and some fans (but mainly, the advertisers) felt the show was too long and too slow to be enjoy / capitalised on fully. So they introduced a much shorter version of the game, inspired by the version played on the grass-root level, and gave it a nifty name with a two-digit number and soon, this version became so big and popular that those who fell in love with the original version of the sport said that the new version was killing it.

I'm talking of course of cricket - After the Test format and ODI format was deemed 'too slow' for some fans, in came Twenty-20 cricket, with just 20 over games to satisfy all our cricketing needs in under three hours. T-20 has become a phenomenon since, and its league in India, the IPL, has become almost as lucrative as football's EPL and basketball's NBA.

But T-20 critics are aplenty - many have complained that it has killed the soul of the game, or that it encourages pinch-hitting cricket without the classic technical skills, that it has become more of a spectacle than a sport.

Whatever side you take on this argument, it is clear that T-20 is here to stay. Now, FIBA 33 is a similar story in many ways. Of course, basketball's long format is about the same length as cricket's short one, but the intention in both cases is to serve the needs of the our collectively shortening attention spans (I'd be surprised if many readers have actually attentively made it this far down in this article!). Just like T-20, FIBA goes back to the grass-roots of the game, thus perhaps encouraging more participation.

But this is where we feel that FIBA needs to be careful. The 3-on-3 format encourages the one thing that many basketball purists detest - the 'I' not in 'Team'. Shanmugam Sridhar, the coach of India's 3-on-3 team that played in Singapore, said: "The 3-on-3 format made for very quick games. It especially helped in showcasing the talents of individual players."

Just like cricket purists have complained that T-20 has "dumbed-down" the game, FIBA 33 critics too may claim that the new format might be a too simplistic version to feature on the big stage.

On the positive note though, T-20 has been good for other formats of cricket in one way - by changing the player's attitude towards greater aggression, and of course, serving as a good platform for youngsters to prove their mettle for the "more respected" versions of the games.

FIBA 33 scores big in the fact that it will be able to involve more countries, since they will be required to field lesser players. India's involvement in the tournament in Singapore proved just that. Also, quicker games would mean greater participation. And both T-20 and FIBA 33 have been great crowd-pullers, so why not just give the people what they want?

Which side of the fence do you sit on with this issue? And while you mull over it, here is a video of the Indian three-on-three team at the Youth Olympics in their 27-11 win over South Africa.

A tale of three leagues

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It's a tale of three leagues, in three countries, of three sports.
1. National Basketball Association (NBA) - Basketball, USA
2. English Premier League (EPL) - Football, England
3. Indian Premier Leauge (IPL) - Cricket, India

India has a total of ONE succesful professional sports league: the IPL. ONE. Like it or hate it, but that's the truth. Hell, even many cricket purists hate it, disregarding the Twenty-20's format as 'real' cricket.

Whatever - we aren't here to argue about what cricket should be. We're here to talk about what the IPL wants to be. The IPL wants to be the NBA, and it has wanted to be the NBA for quite some time. It is no secret that the league format, the franchises, the cheerleaders, the dugout (or "bench"), the player profiles, the "strategic" time-outs, the advertising frenzy, the television broadcasts, etc in the IPL have borrowed heavily from the NBA and even the EPL. Sorry football fans, but in many ways financially, the IPL has actually overtaken the EPL. According to the inaugural Annual Review of Global Sports Salaries (ARGSS) (later published on sportingintelligence.com), IPL became the second highest paid league in the world this year, overtaking the EPL. You know what's it second to? The NBA.

Even NBA Commissioner/Tsar/Maharaja David Stern become a fan of the IPL last November. In an interview with DNA-Mumbai, Stern said, "We are closely watching as to how the IPL has been a game-changer in sport. It has adopted a number of Western sporting practices like the franchise system, player bidding, the home-and-away games, double-headers and the like."

Now, IPL may take yet another page out of the NBA book. After adding two new franchises to the existing eight in the IPL, the BCCI is looking to change its format to finish the tournament in the same seven-week period as the previous three IPL editions. Until IPL-3, each team played each other team twice, home and away, to play a total of 14 matches each, which meant that a grand total of 60 matches were played. If the same format is continued for 10 teams, 94 games would have to be played. The BCCI don't want that because they have a time constraint.

One of their options is to do with the NBA does: Divide the teams into two groups (NBA-read: Conferences) of five. Like the NBA, the teams in the same conference play each other three or four times, whereas teams in opposing conferences play each other twice, once home, and once away. Each team plays 82 games in the regular season. In the IPL, the proposition is that each team plays other teams in its groups twice (home and away) and the teams in the group once.

Good idea, but it does create problems. Home advantage is something that teams obviously rely on, so on what basis will the home games be played in the inter-group games?

The other idea I feel is worse, which is to have the same round-robin system in the two groups, and then the best teams move on to a 'Super Six' stage and they all play each other. With this format, there are many teams who may never get to play each other, and that completely defies the whole point of being a league.

My solution is this: screw the groups. Don't follow the NBA, follow the EPL. Have all teams play each other home AND away like the current system. Play 94 games. I can hear the groans already: there aren't enough days to fit these many games. Or the groans from TV broadcasters: we can't show more than one or two games a day because TV ratings will take a hit.

I don't see why the league can't be expanded to take a longer time. This way, it will become less of a quick tournament and more of a 'season'. Yes, international cricket clashes will cause a problem, but just like international breaks in the football season, the IPL can incorporate their season around cricket international breaks, too.

And it's fine to glamourise our leagues just as media has done it in the US, but their needs to be a limit, and that limit is crossed when the sport is overshadowed by celebrity and marketing culture. I searched for 'ipl' in Google-Images, and you know what I got? Three of the first four photos are of Katrina Kaif, Preity Zinta, and Shah Rukh Khan. The first cricketers don't show up till the eight pic. Even Vijay Mallaya scores earlier.

If we are truly looking to bring a sports league/season culture such as that in the USA, Europe, etc into India, our leagues have to be bigger, last longer, and be ABOUT THE SPORT. It is laughable that the second-richest league in the world lasts just seven weeks.

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The Cricket Delusion: How Indian basketball can learn from the recent field hockey debacle

Let me start with my thesis: Sport in India is a joke.

I write this article as I watch my favourite ever sportsmen devastate the Bangladesh bowling attack with another spectacular performance. He has just completed his 45th Test century (half a dozen more than his nearest competitor), and would go on to make a breathtaking 143 runs.



It’s been 20 years since Sachin Tendulkar first gripped India’s emotions as a talented 16-year-old, and up to this day, he remains in the eye of the Indian public the one untouchable, uniting figure in the country. Globally, he’s ranked as one of the greatest to ever play the game. I don’t exaggerate when I say that there has been no more unanimously loved Indian since that Gandhi character.

Sport can’t be a problem in India when an athlete is the nation’s more powerful icon, can it? Sport can’t be a problem when the Indian Premier League (IPL), a competition of cricket’s newest format, the Twenty-20, is Asia’s first billion dollar sporting league , and one of the richest sporting leagues around the world? Of the top-10 most earning cricketers in the world, spots 1-4 and 6 are occupied by Indians. Number one is the captain of our national cricket team, MS Dhoni, and although his 2009 earnings of approximately 10 million USD are Lilliputian compared to the amount of money that superstar athletes make in other sports worldwide, these cricketers aren’t exactly fighting to feed their kids.

How can sport be a problem when India is ranked the number 1 Test Cricket team in the world? How can sport be a problem when our cricketers are as famous as our much-revered film stars? How can I call sport a joke in India, when millions keep their eyes glued to their TV sets, the housewives offering prayers to our pick of a hundred thousand gods for another victory, the fathers ditching work and the sons ditching school to sit home and watch another India international cricket match?

The problem, obviously, is the fact that all the glorious stories and figures in India belong to cricket, and if we do strike lucky and succeed in another sport, the successes are either quickly forgotten, or the newspapers find it tough to squeeze in the news amongst the barrage of daily cricket stories that the Indian audiences are overdosed with.

There are, of course, a few exceptions. Field Hockey, officially our ‘national sport’ has been headline material twice over the past few years. The first time was in August 2007, when Bollywood came to temporarily save the day (and earn a lot of money) as the blockbuster film Chak De India on the story of India’s women’s hockey team made the sport the flavour of the month.

The second time was a few weeks ago, when the members of the Indian hockey team boycotted a national camp in Pune, demanding their unpaid dues. The news wouldn’t have made as much noise as it did but for the fact that India is set to host the Hockey world cup in a month. There was suddenly the ridiculous danger of the home team fielding a B-squad for the greatest stage of their so-called national sport.



The stand-off between the players and the hockey federation stretched for several days, with everyone from state ministers and movie stars (After Chak De India, superstar actor Shahrukh Khan became the self-appointed ad-hoc spokesperson for Indian hockey) pitching in their opinion.There were debates on national TV, front page articles in the newspapers, and more editorials written about the sport nationwide than those accumulated in the last ten years. The Hockey Federation seemed to have the sponsor money with them, so when news broadcasters asked the federation’s bigwigs in a live telecast about where the money went, they got bumbling, anxious responses. The audiences were glued: we smelled corruption and couldn’t look away.

Cricket must have watched jealously for a week. Well, finally, a resolution was reached: the players got their money, and India began another cricket series. The media’s attention shifted away and order was restored in the universe.

Most of the sport fans in India didn’t even know that the hockey world cup was imminent, and what more, that it was being hosted by India. The general public only became interested when hockey went wrong, and we suddenly had the federation to throw our verbal rotten apples at, and Shahrukh and the media had us showering our sympathy on our poor professionals who never get what they deserve, and the facilities are appalling, and the money is bad, and now, it is the women’s hockey team turn to start asking for their money and so on and so forth.

The problem is that, with all the attention and finances thrown around by the broadcasters, promoters, media, and government authorities to make cricket the most lucrative business in India, there is little left room left to share with other sports in the country. It is perhaps no surprise then, that India, a country of a billion and a half people, has won a staggering ONE (1) individual gold in the history of the Olympic Games, and that too went to the shooter Abhinav Bindra at Beijing 2008, who was rich enough to self-finance his training, equipment, and success, free from the meddling hands of the government. The Olympics, obviously, don’t feature cricket, or India would have be raking in the medals and the positive vibes.

Team sports in India, such as football, basketball, and hockey, are forever stifled by age-old bureaucratic traditions, where a young talent finds it near improbable to climb up the ranks without politicking with the authorities on the side. Football has managed to thrive a little more than the others because of the century old tradition in the country and the marginally successful I-League. Even they have complaints: International superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Leo Messi are far better known than the members of our own national team.

The hockey debacle has once again exposed India’s monomaniacal obsession with cricket. A cricket international would never be treated the way the hockey internationals were. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is obviously the country’s richest sporting body. Compared to it, other sports, and particularly basketball, is still miles behind. Basketball even lacks the ‘national sport’ sentiment that hockey is often credited (or burdened) with or the historical significance of football.

Ayaz Memon, one of India’s most respected sport’s journalist and a columnist for NBA.com/India, writes in his article ‘The Changing Face of Sports’ that, “…NBA can be of help to India: not necessarily because of the sport it represents, but more because of the way it has gone about conducting its business. I used the last word of the previous sentence deliberately, because in India, sport has hardly been seen as business, more as pastime: the government provides some grant, officials hang on to office for power rather than passion for the sport, and players fight heavy odds to eke out a living or at least some glory.”

The NBA business model relies a lot on individual marketing of players to deepen their fan base. Would a basketball star in India ever be marketed this way? Would another sport’s star ever be held in the kind of reverence that is showered on cricketers like Tendulkar or Dhoni? The Basketball Federation of India (BFI) has been pondering bringing in a NBA-inspired league system to basketball here, and although it would generate a little more excitement and hope for the sport, it would only be a modest first step.

Compared to a few of the other sports, Basketball has a relatively cleaner reputation in terms of corruption or embezzlement in India, but I believe that the trend of seniority-based preferential treatment and unfair team selections would have to be cleaned out from the sport’s culture. When I spoke to India’s former women’s national captain Divya Singh, she said, “I don’t like cricket very much, but I admire the way that it is managed. It’s possible for basketball to grow in India. There is a court in most of the schools in India, and kids play the game regularly at a young age. Their talent needs to be channelized in the right way.”



The other good news is that, as time has passed, the attention level of your average viewer is diminishing by the day. Half a century ago, cricket started off as a five-day marathon, and in the 70s morphed into a day-long game. Now, the most recent form of the game (the Twenty-20) only lasts around three hours and has taken cricket hysteria to new heights. If projected as a shorter, faster, and more athletically appealing sport, basketball has the perfect opening to carve out a space for itself in the public's consciousness.

In recent years, Leander Paes, Sania Mirza, Viswanathan Anand, Bhaichung Bhutia, Saina Nehwal, Abhinav Bindra, Vijay Singh, and others have had relative successes in their respective sports, gaining a little bit of fame and commercial value. We are still a long way away before the successes of non-cricket athletes are taken by the majority of Indians seriously. The mainstream media’s regular interest in hockey’s darkest day shouldn’t be just some one-off fling with other sports in India. Like hockey, sports like basketball should be put under the scrutinizing media spotlight, making the structure behind the system accountable as well as help in promoting the game.

*First published on SLAMOnline.com on January 28, 2010.

Australia planning 'IPL' of basketball

So get this: impressed by the media frenzy and commercial success of the Indian Premier League (IPL) of Twenty-20 cricket in India, the Australians are planning a similarly-themed basketball tournament to boost the games popularity in their own country.

From the Brisbane Times:

A radical $250,000 basketball tournament, being billed as the Indian Premier League of hoops, is being planned to help revitalise the sport in Australia.
The week-long tournament, to be held in Adelaide in April, will feature eight privately-owned teams competing for a cash prize and playing under amended rules to encourage high scores and entertaining play.

Teams would earn money according to how far they progress in the tournament, in the same way tennis players do.
The rule restructures are being kept under wraps but may involve cricket-style power plays, where a team is reduced by a player for a period of time, or extra incentive to score points at various stages of the game.

Some of the biggest names in Australian basketball are likely to take part, while owners also have the option of securing the services of overseas stars if deals can be reached.

Now, I've been discussing a possibility of an NBA-inspired basketball league in India for while. In my interview with Indian basketball starlet Divya Singh, Divya said that she believed "... a league will increase the competition level, provide regular games and exposure for players, and will be attractive to the fans.”

Australia already has an NBA-style National Basketball League (NBL), but now they are looking forward to emulating the success of the IPL. I think the intentions are good: more exciting basketball, marketed the right way, will increase fan interest. But this is a dangerous model for us in India should get too romanticized by. I mean, the ideas of 'powerplay' of playing five on four on the court, or points counting more at certain times of the games just make me cringe. These silly rules only end up leading real basketball towards silly exhibitionist stuff, like a Harlem Globetrotter-esque show, or worse Slamball.

An exciting thought, and I would be excited to see if, over the course of time, the BFI create something similar in their footsteps in terms of marketing and increased TV coverage, but please let's not lose the fundamentals.