Basketball: Olympic hopes in jeopardy

The Tall Blacks failed to qualify directly in September. Photo / Dean Purcell

New Zealand's basketball Olympic dream may be fading as the country tiptoes through a minefield of funding and selection issues over the next six weeks.

After failing to qualify directly through the Oceania zone in September, both the Tall Blacks and Tall Ferns face repechage tournaments, probably in Europe, next year if they're to book a spot at London 2012.

But even if they earn their berths by finishing among the top four teams at those ultra-competitive events, the Kiwi hoopsters will still need to convince the New Zealand Olympic Committee that they're worthy of selection.

Those are some of the hard conversations currently taking place in Wellington.

The first formal deadline looms on Friday, when the sport must submit funding applications to High Performance Sport New Zealand. Now a subsidiary of Sparc, this source has basically bankrolled the two national teams in recent years, supplemented by the occasional corporate sponsor.

The problem now is that HPSNZ needs to fund the two teams to the repechage series - but it needs some assurance that they'll be selected if they qualify.

If the NZOC don't think the two teams are good enough to make the quarter-finals of the Olympics, Sparc/HPSNZ may feel that the repechage tournaments are a case of throwing good money after bad.

The Tall Blacks have now attended three consecutive world championships, reaching the semifinals in 2002, and contested the Olympic Games at Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004. The Tall Ferns have been at the last three Olympics but lost their Sparc funding after winning just one game (against Mali) at Beijing 2008.

Both teams have seen their world rankings slip to 18th (the men) and 16th in two years.

Basketball New Zealand's most daunting challenge may be persuading Olympic selectors that the Tall Blacks and Tall Ferns are still capable of reaching the London quarter-finals.

That will be the nature of the conversations and politicking taking place to decide the immediate future of international basketball in this country.

The waters become even murkier when basketball's world body Fiba wades in. HPSNZ aren't due to announce their funding allocations until mid-December but Fiba wants to confirm entries for the repechage tournaments by the end of this month.

If New Zealand chooses not to compete, the Oceania zone - the weakest of five globally - would lose traction with a governing body dominated by European interests. In short, Oceania may lose that second-chance opportunity for good.