What is wrong with these fools running the game?

Dead set the NBL has started......and nobody knows about it???

crowd of 1573 turned up to see the Spirit play......guess what? anyone under 17 was free entry!!!! OMFG!!!

Seriously I am a former Kings fan that doesn't give a shit about the Spirit.....but seriously......

Mate, I do not see the NBL running on after this season if this sort of crap continues.

It might be an idea to bring back the Kings too.

BOTI NAGY wraps up the opening weekend of the 2008-09 NBL season.

GIVE me a break! For God's sake – enough!

Enough of this steady stream of BS from the mindless mainstream media. Aaaaarggggh! So sick of it.

And enough already too with the "Melbourne is the greatest team of all-time" BS.

Can we just give it a rest, people?

I mean, far be it for me to suggest someone does an ounce of research before putting keystroke to cyberspace – speaking of lazy journos, how is that latest "exclusive" Fox column coming there, Steve? – but can somebody please at least rake some of the manure before it is foisted all over us?

Firstly, let me address this to every half-a$$ed journo of the MMM (that's the mindless mainstream media, not the radio station) called in to write a story with even an oblique reference to the NBL.

Can you just stop calling it "near-death", "bankrupt" or "on its knees" for long enough to witness this.

The 31st season of the league started on Saturday.

Just for your information, the NSL lasted 28 years with 42 different teams before it was revamped into the A-League four seasons ago.

The national netball league came and went after 11 seasons, making way for the trans-Tasman competition.

I could go on, but why spoil you? The point is, it's starting to give me a pain in the ask to constantly see the NBL treated as second-rate and told it is bankrupt because Brisbane, Sydney and Singapore are gone.

Wasn't the Bullets' demise at least in part due to the savaging of its owner's childcare empire? How does that reflect on the NBL?

Singapore is soaring along playing its own schedule and is far from bankrupt.

OK. The Kings situation was diabolical and the league is complicit because it signs off on ownership changes. (Just as it is complicit in murking the waters at Brisbane by endorsing the new group which came in – press conference and all – then bailed out after six weeks, leaving Eddy Groves in the lurch. The NBL should be wearing hot egg over that effort.)

Is the league soaring?

Hell no.

It has started with no coordinated launch, no sponsor and a minimised television presence. (At least Steve will have time now to write a new Carfino's Corner. That halfway mark report from January 4 last season was an exceptional piece of insightful investigative work though, I must admit. It'd take most of us a while to follow that up too.)

Yet, on one hand, everyone agrees the league needed less teams and it's happened by natural attrition.

Sure, we can't wait for the BA-NBL review to revamp the league next season but I'm so sick and tired of the NBL becoming the whipping-boy for any lazy journo of the MMM to get in his/her cheap-shots.

By the way, whatever happened to the Claxton Shield, guys and gals? Been and gone. Yet still the NBL remains.

Is upgrading its website in-season again a joke?

Why, yes, of course. The stats were pretty fouled up at the weekend too. But how will the standard on the floor be this season?

Absolutely crackerjack. Let's talk about that, or is that a positive?

Less teams, a better talent spread. Oh yeah. This might just be the sharpest season of the 31.

And now, please, let's stop with the "Melbourne has the greatest team of all time" *****.

I'll pose the authors and perpetrators of that line the following questions.

When the Tigers drop a game this season, does that make the team which beats them greater than the greatest line-up of all-time?

How would the stellar starting stud-stream of Barlow-Ere-Mackinnon-Grizzard-Anstey go against Blicavs-Smith-Morseau-Barnett-Sengstock?

Or against Carroll-Graham-Leader-Fisher-Dillon? Or Green-Pearce-Ali-Davis-Jones? Or for that matter, Gaze-Copeland-Giddey-Timmons-Bradtke? Or McDonald-Tucker-Thomas-Anstey-Mottram?

I could go on but the point here is twofold. If you don't recognise those few quintets I pulled off the top of my head (with apologies to Perth, Sydney and South East Melbourne's best teams) then you're in no way qualified to say jack-sheet about "the greatest line-up of all time".

So just sit there and shut the pluck up.

Here's something else. Every five I named led its team to a championship. Until the Tigers do that, for God's sake give it a rest.