The NBL26 finals series tips off tonight with the Wildcats taking on South East Melbourne at John Cain Arena.
In a one game berth, the loser will receive a double chance to play the winner of Melbourne United and Tasmania.
The winner of tonight’s clash will advance to a best-of-three series against the Adelaide 36ers to earn their spot in the best-of-five championship series.
With the 3rd seeded Phoenix holding a record of 22-11 at the end of the home and away season and 4th seeded Wildcats holding 21-12, the match is expected to be close tonight.
SportFM spoke to NBL CEO David Stevenson this morning, with his tip favouring the travellers.
“They’ve had a pretty good run on the Phoenix this year and I think they’re playing brilliant basketball,” he said.
“It still just amazes me the role that Christian Dolittle plays in particular, so I think they’re a really big show.”
The play-in style format has been used since NBL23 and was introduced not only to lengthen the finals series as a whole, but to create tighter competition leading into and during the series.
“The idea in the play-in format really gives hope to those teams who are on the cusp of finals. And so I think to be able to see those couple of games, tonight with the Wildcats and South East Melbourne and then tomorrow night with Melbourne-Tassie, what it does is it creates a reason for people to watch because it’s all on the line and teams can start to get eliminated from here.”
“I think what we will see is close games and the fact that we’ve got teams from all across the country playing… I think you’ll see some unpredictable basketball.”
Overall Stevenson said this season has been a large success thus far, seeing promising numbers and the addition of events like Hoopsfest proving so.
“We’ve been thrilled with this season. We put some numbers out this week and we had 58 sell-outs and record broadcast growth; 20% on ESPN and Kayo and 20% on Channel 10.”
But it is the quality of basketball we are seeing that the CEO believes proves the real success of the league.
“I think the numbers would say it’s been a good season, but it’s really on the court what we spend a lot of time on… over the course of the season you’ve seen each of those top five teams be the best team in it at that time.”
“Melbourne started strong 9-0, Adelaide, South East Melbourne, obviously the Wildcats and now Sydney have probably had the best form coming into finals.”
“I think we’ve now had 39 players go directly from the NBL to the NBA… so what that does is gives us great confidence. We had so many NBA scouts come out for Hoopsfest this year in Perth and that means the players love that because they know that the best way for them to get to the NBA is really through the NBL, and that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
We can expect to see more top quality basketball tonight in the first game of the NBL26 finals series, with the Wildcats-Phoenix clash tipping off at 4:30pm AWST.
IMAGE: Getty Images