NBA Academy’s Noida base to cease operations

Bengaluru: The National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Academy in the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh will cease to function in the near future. 

The large sports complex had came up in 2017 when the American league was attempting to reiterate its commitment to spreading the sport on Indian shores, besides a series of coaching clinics and visits from the players from the most influential basketball league in the world. 

Since its inception, the Academy has given the country some of the finest talents on record. While this move can be inferred to go against NBA’s commitment to the Indian market, it could well have something to do with the Basketball Federation of India’s new-found enthusiasm for assisting the sport at the grassroots level. 

Earlier this year, the Aadhav Arjuna-headed BFI announced that they would be partnering with schools, colleges and private sports centres to establish ten National Basketball Academies across India. 

“We will basically do what the NBA was doing in the country, but we will do it across more venues,” said an influential member of the BFI. “We will handle scouting, provide standardised coaching, and have a steady supply of foreign coaches.”

In a sense, this is not too different from what NBA’s existing programs, including the Junior NBA Program, Basketball Without Borders and school initiatives, did in their stints.

With BFI assuming the role, it will be interesting to see what the NBA will focus on, but should NBA India country head Rajah Chaudhry’s interview from a couple of months ago be read into, it would seem the US-based Academy is likely to ideate more and leave the executing to the BFI. 

As for the facility in Noida, Chaudhry said: “We believe an expanded, scalable model that will reach a wider group of players across the country will be more successful in developing a sustainable pipeline of elite-level Indian players.”

What Chaudhry is alluding to is that the NBA will have several smaller centres to help facilitate BFI with their goals rather than one large centre in Greater Noida.  

While this is possibly the most symbiotic the two organisations have been in years, the very fact that a facility of such significance to Indian basketball is coming to a close is something that the fraternity will be worried about. Moreover, the BFI has not always been the most consistent when it comes to following through with plans so should they revert to old patterns, NBA could well plot an exit strategy.

In any case, they have not been able to achieve what they set out to do over a decade ago which was to get an Indian playing in the NBA league.