The missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential of British basketball

The squeak of rubber soles filled the arena, the smell of popcorn and hotdogs was in the air and the atmosphere was electric. It was Manchester in 1999, but this was not an Oasis concert, or even a Manchester United match. It was the British Basketball League (BBL) title-decider between the Manchester Giants and Sheffield Sharks.

Sheffield eventually clinched the league title on a last-second, game-winning jump-shot. That it would be the high-water mark of the BBL wouldn’t have crossed the minds of any of the 11,000 in attendance that day. Nor would it have occurred to those watching at home, live on Sky Sports. Or the sponsors who had thrown their weight behind the league – Budweiser took naming rights that year, but were joined by Playboy and Peugeot – in the expectation of Britain going basketball mad in the new millennium.

Chris Finch, currently head coach of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and the man calling the shots for Sheffield that day, remembers it well. “That game was emblematic of what the game [in the UK] had the potential to become and, at times, was,” he says. On the Manchester bench was another future NBA head coach: Nick Nurse, who won the NBA title with the Toronto Raptors in 2019.

British basketball was creating such a buzz, in fact, that NTL outbid Sky with a 10-year, £22m contract, but within two years had filed for bankruptcy. ITV Digital picked up the rights but themselves went under 18 months later, robbing the BBL of £21m, untold exposure, and the chance to capitalize on the momentum of British basketball’s big moment.

It has struggled to recover ever since, plagued by chronic underfunding and political infighting. To be a British basketball fan in the 21st-century is to live with a series of