Last April, the PBA-backed national basketball team, Powerade Team Pilipinas, played a pair of tune-up games against a selection from Australia. The series came on the heels of the cancellation of a previously scheduled tuneup match against a professional team in Puerto Rico. The PBA scrambled to find a replacement so that the team could see some much needed court time, and ended up flying over a ragtag bunch of Australian ballers for the exhibition games.

Team Pilipinas wiped the floor with the Aussies in the first game, and it became apparent immediately that the visitors were overmatched. For the second game, PBA imports Tiras Wade and Shawn Daniels were assigned to reinforce the team, and while the additions helped make a more competitive second game, it was clear that the money spent on bringing the ballers from Down Under was not worth the money, the time, or the effort.

It turns out that all of basketball in Australia is in a state of disarray. The country's premiere basketball organization, the National Basketball League, is reportedly in trouble after one of its most popular teams, the Melbourne Tigers, decided to fold up.

Teams in the league have complained of the lack of business viability given less interest in the sport across the country. But the Tigers' departure hurts more than anything because of the team's storied history; former Tigers coach Lindsey Gaze is a member of the Sport Australia Hall of Fame and coached at the Olympics four times, while his son Andrew has been the greatest superstar in NBL history during his Melbourne stint, apart from having starred at Seton Hall in the US NCAA and having a cup of tea with a couple of NBA teams.