Jordans, NBA Streams and Saints: A Snapshot of Basketball in Wellington

Sally Ward (she/her)

I’m sitting up the back of LAWS301, and I can count at least eight NBA streams on screens. Colourfully swooshed feet dribble out of lecture theatres in droves. Steven Adams publishes a book. Basketball is showing up everywhere I go.

Back in 2013, Emily Steel of the Financial Times reported that “the NBA has been a pioneer in exporting its game across the globe”, with games broadcast to more than 215 countries. Steel writes that its global reach was in part established by a 25- year effort led by David Stern, the NBA Commissioner who ran advertising campaigns everywhere from China to Portugal.

I’m a new fan of the NBA (a Brooklyn Nets supporter) and have only been following the game for a couple of years. I have to thank my friends who shared all their knowledge with me. Last year I was randomly watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and was hit weirdly hard by the scene where Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson go to a basketball game, their shiny faces pressed between foam fingers. I realised that I might never attend an NBA game or experience the thrill of live basketball. This sent me on a journey to understand how basketball manifests in Wellington.

I went to two Saints games in their recently wrapped up season, dug around historical archives, and spoke to three fans of the game (NBA and otherwise). I’ve reached the conclusion that the NBA is massive, but we’re largely missing out on seeing the game live due to the potency of American cultural capital.

A lot of our other popular sports, like rugby and cricket, were inherited from England. Basketball is distinct in this sense and has taken off in a way that other American sports, like football or baseball, haven’t. Basketball was first played in New Zealand in 1908 under the influence of J.H. Greenwood, who was appointed as the physical director of the Wellington YMCA. He had moved from Brooklyn, New York. By 1934, an excitingly big set of courts were put in at Hataitai.

Throughout the early-to-mid 20th century, the game grew steadily but not hugely. New Zealand went semi- professional in 1981 when the National Basketball League was established. The 10-team league is now played from Invercargill to Auckland. Our local team, the Wellington Saints, won the 2021 season. There’s also the Australian NBL, which the NZ Breakers compete in.

“Me and my Dad would shoot hoops in the driveway”, George Young tells me. This is his first memory of basketball as a kid. In 2008, he visited China and saw one of the massive ads featuring Kobe that was part of a Stern’s global marketing push. It was about then that George started taking an interest in the NBA. Initially, it was hard to watch games, but he could check the box scores online. George has been a long supporter of Oklahoma City Thunder because Kevin Durant was his favourite player. He already liked OKC “and then Steven Adams showed up, which I was happy about”.

George sees that there’s been a huge push towards making the NBA a worldwide thing. Talking about basketball is a “go-to at the barbershop because there’s a high chance they’ll know about the NBA.” But George doesn’t follow local basketball. “The NBA is like the best players around the world competing, and that’s cool to watch.” He’s not really interested in the local scene.

For Thabiso Sibanda (Thabi), who grew up in Karori, basketball is part of his identity. He’s been following the game from a young age. He remembers seeing it on the internet and understanding it as “a thing that black people do”.

“It’s like my interest in rap music, it’s still to the core of who I am as an individual”, he tells me.

“It would be unfair of me to talk about basketball culture and not rap music”, Thabi adds. “Like, it being cool to play basketball was also at the explosion of it being cool to listen to rap music and also sneaker culture.” He summarised this as “black culture being exported to New Zealand”.

Thabi later started selling NBA singlets to kids at school. They were around $120 at Foot Locker “which wasn’t very accessible”. As an enterprising teenager, he found some for $30 on a website and sold them for $50 at school. At uni, Thabi recalls how the basketball hoop became the centre of hall life. If people were shooting hoops you could look down from floors above; it was great for a run around. Most poignantly, Thabi made a friend in a lecture peering over a classmate’s shoulder to watch a stream.

I asked Thabi if he had any interest in supporting local basketball. “I’m a bit of a basketball snob” he admitted, but thinks that it’s something he’d like to show up for.

Next, I spoke to Sam Fairley who grew up in Mana, Wellington. He is a fireman with two kids, a huge NBA fan but also attends Wellington games. He played basketball at school.

He watched the Saints play “as a kid all the time. It was really popular in the late 80s when it was on TV”.He reminds me that back in the day Wellington had another team, The Hutt Valley Lakers, “after the big boom of the 80s”.

Sam’s favourite local player is Leon Henry, who’s been playing for the Saints since 2004 and has won six championships. Henry also played five seasons for the Breakers in the NBL.

Sam reckons “going to the Saints is the best value in town for sports to go and watch, because it’s not very expensive and it’s fun to watch.” He says the Saints are “well supported and have a long history. “It’s half the price of a game of rugby and [is played] inside so you’re not freezing your tits off.”

His son, 8-year-old Benny, wanted to comment as well: “the Saints are cool”.

I asked Sam why he thought local basketball isn’t hugely popular compared to the NBA. “People are uneducated that the standard is really good and wouldn’t be aware of how good the standard is.” He also noted that “there’s a lot of turn-over of players, which makes it difficult” to get behind the teams as much.

An NZ basketball highlight for Sam was when the Tall Blacks came fourth in the world champs; “for me that’s, the most underrated game in New Zealand history”, he said.

A key theme I noticed in all three interviews is the way our adolescent experiences inform loyalty. Associations of watching, playing, and talking about games become shared moments between parents and children, and can form friendships between strangers.

In New Zealand, the manifestation of basketball culture is complex. It’s undeniable that the NBA is basketball at its best, in terms of players, sponsorship, cultural significance, and popularity. It’s bigger than a game at this point. The increased accessibility of the NBA with the internet and social media has stoked international fandom. More specifically, as Thabi highlighted, the explosion in popularity of basketball owes an awful lot to black culture and the intersection of basketball, rap, and of course, sneakers.

Basketball is increasingly played as the sport of choice in NZ high schools, and we owe access to this to local organisations and coaches. Maybe I just wanted a Kate Hudson moment, but I’d say there’s a quiet history to our own leagues (both the NZNBL and the Australian NBL). While we can watch clips and streams of the NBA, there’s something lovely about being at a sold out game at our very own TSB Arena.