Turns out, the Australian league, the NBL, isn't even in the top 10, with ESPN ranking the NBL 12th in the world outside of the NBA. I felt ridiculously uninformed to discover just how many professional basketball leagues there were outside of the NBA and NBL. Especially when 11 of them are ranked higher than us.

From a careers perspective, it is an interesting network setup. With the NBA sitting at the pinnacle of the basketball universe, the other leagues in the world are treated like feeder competitions for excellence. We invest in our players, train them, push them, play them, and if they are really good, we send them on their way to the NBA, or one of the other top professional leagues in the world.

But, if we keep losing our best players to the higher ranked leagues, how are we supposed to grow our own?

Thinking about it like a business, if you invest, train, support and lead your staff to be the best that they can be, then you also work hard to retain them. It's not celebrated as a point of pride that someone we've shaped and led has taken all of that hard work and delivered it on the doorstep of a bigger, international company.

But in the NBL, we do. When our players are good enough to play in a higher ranked league, instead of investing further in them and encouraging them to share their expertise and skills with junior up-and-coming players, we celebrate their achievement of being drafted into other teams in other leagues.

And frankly, I can't blame the players. I mean, from their perspective, if you were hired in tech support for a medium-sized business, for example, and was then offered a job at Google including relocation, awesome salary and all the perks that go along with it, would you turn it down?

Remember, basketball is a business after all and it is BIG business in the US, reportedly pulling in $10 billion for the 2021/22 season with the NBA salary cap set at $123.655m for the season. To put that in perspective, the NBL salary cap is just $1.474m and the league is just turning a profit.

Just like all sports and performance-based events, COVID hit basketball hard. But we have so much potential here. Despite having a league ranked 12th in the world outside the NBA, our national men's team is 3rd in the world rankings. Our exports to the US, while frustrating losses to us, represent us well on the US courts, and currently number more than ever before across both the men's and women's leagues. While Basketball Australia's strategic priorities are worth striving for - growing participation across all age groups, driving commercial growth, and maintaining high profile and high performing national teams - this requires us to retain our stars, no?

MORE ZOE WUNDENBERG:

When the Adelaide 36ers brought home a "W" against the Phoenix Suns last week in their US pre-season, we showed the world what Australian basketball is capable of. Andrew Gaze championed our league in the commentary box and we showed how NBA's little brother had grown up.

I'm not a part of the business of basketball. I can only comment as a lifelong fan. But it is frustrating to see Australian-developed players grow and excel under the leadership of the Australian league, only to be pinched by the "big leagues" overseas. Some of them don't even return home to play for their national team in international competitions, choosing instead to stay where the money is. What I wouldn't give to feel only pride in what we can showcase and not anxious expectation of "enjoying it while we can" before they leave to slay giants in the spotlight of NBA arenas, and step into their own on another's court.

We are better than just being an NBA feed. I'd love to see a focus on player retention and show the world what our league can really become.