Basketball: Stalwart wants franchise to show some fight

Former Otago Nuggets coach Todd Marshall will be almost as nervous as the players when the franchise makes its National Basketball League comeback in Auckland tonight.

Marshall played for the Nuggets, he coached the franchise for two three-year stints and is even on the honours board for long service. In every sense of the word, he is a Nuggets stalwart.

When Basketball Otago decided not to enter a team in the 2009 league, he refused to take the news lying down. He got himself elected to the board and has been one of the key figures in helping get the team back on the court.

A proud but modest man, Marshall wants to look to the future rather than discuss how the Nuggets were resurrected. But, for the record, if it had not been for a desperate basketball community rallying around the team, the Nuggets might have gone the way of the dodo.

While just getting back on the court is a significant achievement, Marshall wants more from his beloved Nuggets. He wants to see them compete and, even if the wins do not come, to see the sort of performances the franchise can build on.

"It will be a bit nerve-wracking," Marshall said.

"I hope they go well. We want it to be a good experience so it helps the team grow stronger.

"We just want to see a team [in] which, when you look at at the end of the year, you can see signs of improvement. We expect the team to go out there and play to win. That does not mean you're going to win. But we want to see them fight for every win they can.

"We still have to put a creditable performance on the court so people say it is good to have them back."

Marshall described the year out of the league as damaging but said it provided the franchise the opportunity to start afresh.

"It was pretty hard last year when there was no team or anything to go and watch. There was nothing. It just ended.

"We lost a lot of players, but the other way to look at it is we got rid of a lot of dead wood and let's go and see what we can do and start off fresh. In some ways it might have been necessary."

While Marshall hopes the Nuggets can be competitive, the real yardstick by which their success might be measured is how many players they can retain.

"If players we are developing now are playing for another franchise in their prime . . . ," Marshall said, trailing off as if the prospect were too awful to imagine, before adding the franchise must retain its local talent if it was going to be competitive and remain viable in the long term.

It is a philosophy which has led to the Nuggets opting for local talent instead of getting the cheque book out and spending up large on its playing roster.

Not that the Nuggets have that luxury, anyway. A proposed working budget of just under $500,000 has had the chainsaw taken to it to save money where possible.

"We will need to be coming under $300,000. Ideally, you might want to do more but I don't know whether it is sustainable to keep a team here year after year if we go up to that sort of level.

"It's too hard. We just have to rebuild and, hopefully, the team will grow stronger each year and the support will flood in behind it. That might let us get to that level, I don't know."