National Basketball League back after three years
Published:Thursday | April 6, 2023 | 1:12 AMOrane Buchanan/Staff Reporter
PRESIDENT OF the Jamaica Basketball Association (JBA), Paulton Gordon, is elated to announce that the National Basketball League (NBL) will make its return next month, following a three-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The NBL, which has bred some of the country’s best prospects, is expected to be highly competitive, with Gordon insisting the talent in Jamaica is already anxious to get started after the announcement.
“We [JBA] are quite elated. As an association we’ve been having a fair amount of basketball activities and one of the primary sports properties that we usually do is the NBL. We want to start at the very last week in May and we are expecting the top 10 teams in the island to participate in this activity,” said Gordon.
Gordon said three venues would be earmarked to host the games, which he believes will help grow awareness about basketball in Jamaica.
“The games will be primarily played at the National Stadium court, mainly outdoors, but [we] will be having selected games indoors. We are looking at hosting some games in Montego Bay and since there is a central parish involved, we are trying to identify an appropriate venue in the Manchester area to play a few of the games as well.”
The NBL was stopped four games into the 2019 season, though Gordon believes there were enough programmes to stop the sport or the players from stagnating during the hiatus.
“I think it was affected in a lot of ways because even at the high-school level there was no basketball, but now, we are back on track. But over the last year or so we’ve had a fair amount of competition, in both the high schools and at the under-19 level. The community league is also back with 19 teams in the southern conference, while we’ve had a number of other basketball activities pending.”
The activity that has taken place outside of the NBL gives Gordon reason to believe that the standard of the NBL will be quite high.
“All the players have been involved in the last six to eight months, so the players that would be part of this league, most of them played in the Division One, while the others are playing in the community league, so I don’t expect any dip in form or quality because over the last couple months they would have been active.”