SA basketball league needs a shake-up, says Vincent after MBB’s early BAL exit

Experienced head coach Sam Vincent has bemoaned the current structure of South Africa’s domestic Basketball National League (BNL), saying it needs to change if the country’s teams are to be successful on the continent. 

Vincent, a 1986 NBA champion with the Boston Celtics, was speaking after his Johannesburg-based team Made By Ball (MBB) was eliminated from Africa’s biggest tournament, the Basketball Africa League, in Rwanda on Sunday.

Their exit from the Nile Conference sabotaged their dreams of hooping in the playoffs in front of their home crowd in Pretoria. 

Vincent and several players had referred to the team not having time playing together ahead of the Kigali tournament, as some players, including international imports Robinson Odoch Opong, Jovan Mooring and Teafale Lenard Jr, only had a few sessions with the team.

In his postmortem after their debut BAL, during which MBB chalked up two wins, Vincent said the team’s woes started back in the BNL.

He felt there were not enough league matches in a season for the development of players, in comparison to other countries.

In the past season, teams in the BNL played four to five games, excluding playoffs, in three months.

This is inferior when compared with Africa’s top two leagues — the Egyptian Basketball Premier League and Tunisian leagues — which combined, have produced three title holders in the BAL, which is in its fifth season.

Teams in the Egyptian league play 14 matches in six months, and 19 in Tunisia in the regular season, excluding playoffs.

“There has to be a form of a national league that has to have five to six months of continuous play, with 20 to 25 games,” Vincent said. 

“I saw the schedule for the BNL league, there are only three to four games in the season, and that is not enough competition if the South African players are to improve and get better because they need to play.

“That has to happen. I think now there are a lot of discussions around Basketball SA to make the national team functional.

“These are organisational things and there have to be agreements put in place so that the [players] can come home and be able to play.”

Vincent owned and served as player-coach of South Africa’s Professional Basketball League (PBL) Cape Town Kings in the 1990s and mentored the men’s national basketball team to historic achievements, including a ninth-place finish at the 2003 Fiba AfroBasket and a landmark victory over Senegal, a powerhouse in African basketball.

But South Africa had not been active in international competitions as the federation had withdrawn from several qualification competitions.

The last time the men’s team played was in 2017. They only returned to the international circuit less than 36 months ago.