Every NBL Club and What Defines It
All ten NBL clubs one by one — home arenas, title counts, identity and history, plus the champion clubs that no longer exist and where expansion goes next.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Competition21 min read
- Clubs
- 10
- Clubs outside Australia
- 1
- Most championships
- Perth Wildcats, 10
- Founding clubs still competing
- Illawarra Hawks
- Newest club
- Tasmania JackJumpers, entered 2021-22
- Clubs yet to win a title
- Cairns and S.E. Melbourne
- Largest home arena
- Sydney SuperDome, 18,200
- Smallest home arena
- Derwent Entertainment Centre, 4,340
There are ten NBL clubs, and the striking thing about the list is how few of them are original. Only one club — the Illawarra Hawks — has played every season since the league began in 1979. Two of the others folded and came back. Two are less than a decade old. Several of the competition's most successful clubs no longer exist at all, and three of them won championships.
That is the frame for reading the modern NBL. This is not a competition that grew steadily from a foundation set. It is what survived a golden run in the late 1980s, a consolidation in the 1990s, a near-death experience in 2008 and 2009, and a rebuild since 2015 that has been careful to the point of stinginess about issuing new licences.
This page goes through all ten one at a time: where the club came from, where it plays, what it has won and what its supporters think it stands for. It also covers the clubs that are gone and the markets that keep being named as the eleventh. If you want the competition's mechanics rather than its cast, start with how the NBL works; if you want the bracket that decides the title, the finals guide has it.
The ten NBL clubs at a glance
| Club | City | Home arena | Capacity | First NBL season | Titles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adelaide 36ers | Adelaide, SA | Adelaide Entertainment Centre | 11,300 | 1982 | 4 |
| Brisbane Bullets | Brisbane, QLD | Brisbane Entertainment Centre | 10,500 | 1979 | 3 |
| Cairns Taipans | Cairns, QLD | Cairns Convention Centre | 5,300 | 1999-2000 | 0 |
| Illawarra Hawks | Wollongong, NSW | Wollongong Entertainment Centre | 6,000 | 1979 | 2 |
| Melbourne United | Melbourne, VIC | John Cain Arena | 10,175 | 1984 | 6 |
| New Zealand Breakers | Auckland, NZ | Spark Arena | 9,740 | 2003-04 | 4 |
| Perth Wildcats | Perth, WA | Perth Arena | 14,800 | 1982 | 10 |
| S.E. Melbourne Phoenix | Melbourne, VIC | John Cain Arena and State Basketball Centre | 10,175 and 3,422 | 2019-20 | 0 |
| Sydney Kings | Sydney, NSW | Sydney SuperDome | 18,200 | 1988 | 6 |
| Tasmania JackJumpers | Hobart and Launceston, TAS | Derwent Entertainment Centre and Silverdome | 4,340 and 3,255 | 2021-22 | 1 |
Capacities are the basketball configuration for the 2026-27 season. Title counts include championships won under previous club names, which is why Melbourne United's six includes the Melbourne Tigers era and Illawarra's two includes the Wollongong Hawks period. Brisbane's three span an absence of eight seasons.
- 10Total clubs
- 6States with a club
- 1Clubs outside Australia
- 2Clubs sharing an arena
- 2Clubs using two home venues
Counts licences for the 2026-27 season rather than population, revenue or crowd. Victoria's two clubs share a primary arena; Queensland's two are separated by 1,400 kilometres of coast.
Perth Wildcats
The most successful club in the league's history, and by a distance. Ten championships — 1990, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020 — make Perth the only NBL club to have won titles in four different decades.
The franchise began in 1982 as the Westate Wildcats and took the Perth name in 1984. Its arena history reads like a summary of Australian basketball's growth: 800 seats at Perry Lakes, 5,000 at the Superdome from 1987, 8,000 at the Perth Entertainment Centre from 1990, and since 2012 the 14,800-seat Perth Arena, which visiting players call the Jungle.
The number that defines the club is not ten, though. It is 35: consecutive seasons in the finals, from 1987 to 2021, an achievement no other professional Australian sporting club has come close to. The streak finally ended in 2021-22 when Perth finished fifth with a 16-12 record, and its ending was treated in Western Australia as a genuine event.
Perth's identity is isolation turned into an advantage. The club is 2,000 kilometres from its nearest rival, every visiting team arrives after a long flight into a different time zone, and the home crowd has spent four decades understanding exactly how much that is worth. The Wildcats set a regular-season home attendance total of 183,689 across 2017-18 and drew 13,661 to a single fixture in December 2025.
Sydney Kings
Six championships in two distinct bursts: 2003, 2004 and 2005, then 2022, 2023 and 2026. Both were three-peats, and the Kings are one of only two clubs to have managed that at all.
The club was formed in October 1987 from a merger of the West Sydney Westars and the Sydney SuperSonics, and entered the NBL in 1988. It adopted purple and gold — the colours of the dominant NBA club of the 1980s — and spent its early years being mocked for the gap between the ambition and the results. Supporters nicknamed the team the Violet Crumbles, after a chocolate bar that shatters under pressure.
The Kings' lowest point was terminal. On 12 June 2008 the NBL cancelled the licence after the club's backer collapsed and players could not be paid. Sydney spent two seasons out of the competition and was relaunched for 2010-11 after being bought for 20,000 dollars — a figure worth remembering the next time anyone describes the NBL's growth as inevitable.
The modern club plays at the Sydney SuperDome, the largest arena in the competition at 18,200 for basketball, and has been the league's most aggressive recruiter of star Australians. The 2026 championship, won 3-2 over Adelaide with Kendric Davis taking the Finals MVP award, was the third title of the second dynasty.
Melbourne United
Six championships across two identities. As the Melbourne Tigers the club won in 1993, 1997, 2006 and 2008; as Melbourne United it won in 2018 and 2021.
The Tigers entered the NBL in 1984 after winning the SEABL championship the previous year, and for two decades the club was effectively a family concern. Lindsay Gaze coached it; his son Andrew played for it, scored an NBL-record 44.1 points a game in 1987 and became the most recognisable Australian basketballer of his generation. The 1993 and 1997 titles are still described in Melbourne as the Gaze championships.
The rebrand to Melbourne United on 20 May 2014 was pitched as uniting all of Victorian basketball behind a single club. It was received badly by members, past players and a good share of the support base, and the argument has never entirely gone away. Six retired jerseys hang in the arena, Andrew Gaze's number 10 among them.
The club plays at John Cain Arena at Melbourne Park, a building it shares with a rival NBL club and, for two weeks every January, with the Australian Open. United reached the championship series in both 2024 and 2025 and lost both.
Adelaide 36ers
Four titles: 1986, 1998, 1999 and 2002. The club was founded in 1982 as the Adelaide City Eagles and renamed the following year, the 36ers name marking the proclamation of the colony of South Australia on 28 December 1836. It remains the only NBL club representing the state.
The 1986 side is the one Adelaide talks about. A 24-2 regular season earned it the nickname the Invincibles, and it sits alongside a run of 20 consecutive home wins dating from June 1985 as the high-water mark of South Australian basketball.
The 36ers also hold the single most quoted result in NBL history. In October 2022 they beat the Phoenix Suns 134-124 in a preseason game in Arizona — the only time an NBL club has beaten an NBA team, and a result that did more for the league's international profile than any amount of marketing.
Home is the Adelaide Entertainment Centre at Hindmarsh, used since 2019 after nearly three decades at the venue previously known as Titanium Security Arena. Adelaide reached the 2026 Championship Series and lost it 3-2 to Sydney, with Bryce Cotton — the reigning league MVP and leading scorer — on their roster after moving from Perth.
New Zealand Breakers
Founded in 2003 and admitted for the 2003-04 season, the Breakers are the only non-Australian club in the competition and its most improbable success story. Four championships — 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015 — include a three-peat that only the Sydney Kings had previously managed.
Their significance is bigger than the trophies. The Breakers are the professional destination for New Zealand basketball and a major route for Pacific and international talent into the Australian league, and their presence is the main reason the NBL can describe itself as a trans-Tasman competition rather than a national one.
The cost is travel. Every away game is an international flight, and during the pandemic seasons the club relocated to Australia for extended periods, a disruption no rival faced. Home is Spark Arena in Auckland, which holds 9,740 for basketball and produces some of the loudest crowds in the league.
Four jersey numbers have been retired. Majority ownership passed to businessman Marc Mitchell in March 2025. The club's most recent contribution to the competition's profile was Karim López, the Next Star who spent two seasons in Auckland before Memphis drafted him 21st in 2026, making him the first Mexican-born player taken in the first round.
Brisbane Bullets
A 1979 foundation club with three championships — 1985, 1987 and 2007 — and the longest absence of any current club. On 30 June 2008 the owner returned the licence to the league, and Brisbane spent eight seasons out of the NBL before being revived for 2016-17.
The arena history is unusually restless even by NBL standards: Auchenflower Stadium, then Sleeman Sports Centre, then the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, then the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre for the pre-collapse years and the first seasons back, then Nissan Arena from 2019, and back to the Brisbane Entertainment Centre from 2024.
Brisbane's problem is the one Queensland's basketball history keeps producing: a genuinely large market that has never sustained the attention the club's history deserves. The 1985 and 1987 sides were among the strongest of the league's golden era, and the 2007 title came in the last season before the collapse — a championship followed almost immediately by the end of the club.
Illawarra Hawks
The competition's continuous thread. Founded in 1979 as one of the NBL's inaugural clubs, Illawarra are the only current side to have played in every season since, through three name changes — Illawarra Hawks to 1998, Wollongong Hawks to 2015, briefly just the Hawks in 2020-21, and Illawarra again since.
Two championships, 44 years apart in competition terms: 2001 and 2025. The second came with the club's first minor premiership, a 20-9 regular season in 2024-25, and it ended a drought that had spanned most of the modern league.
What is remarkable is that the club exists at all. In February 2009, captain Mat Campbell launched a Save the Hawks campaign after the ownership group said it could not continue, and the community effort worked. In 2015 the organisation entered voluntary administration when a major sponsor withdrew. In April 2020 the NBL took control again before awarding the licence to new owners that June. Three near-deaths in eleven years, and a championship five years after the last of them.
Home is the Wollongong Entertainment Centre, 6,000 seats and one of the two or three loudest buildings in the competition. Before 1998 the Hawks played at a venue called Snakepit Stadium, which tells you most of what you need to know about the club's self-image.
Tasmania JackJumpers
Established in 2020, entered for the 2021-22 season, and champions by 2024 — the fastest a new NBL club has ever won a title. The grand final series was won 3-2 over Melbourne United, with Jack McVeigh taking Grand Final MVP.
The name comes from the jack jumper ant, a venomous species largely confined to the island state, and it was chosen over more conventional options precisely because it was local and slightly hostile. Scott Roth has coached the club since its first season and won Coach of the Year in 2022, when Tasmania reached a grand final in their debut campaign.
The JackJumpers play primarily at the Derwent Entertainment Centre in Hobart, the smallest primary home in the competition at 4,340, with a minimum of two home games a season at the Silverdome in Launceston. The atmosphere in Hobart is the club's competitive advantage and its supporters know it.
Majority ownership passed from the league to private equity firm Altor Capital in February 2025, and in August 2025 Tasmania secured a WNBL licence for a women's club entering in 2026-27. For a state with no top-flight club in any national competition until the JackJumpers arrived, that is a remarkable five years.
Cairns Taipans
Founded in 1999 and in the league from 1999-2000, the Taipans represent far north Queensland from the smallest market in the competition. Two grand finals, in 2011 and 2015, both lost to the New Zealand Breakers, and a minor premiership in 2014-15 off a 21-7 record.
No championship, and the reason is structural rather than a failure of will. Cairns is a small city a long way from anywhere, its arena holds 5,300, and its budget has never matched the clubs it competes against for imports. The club is owned by an incorporated association rather than a private investor, which makes it one of the last community-owned entities at this level of Australian sport.
The Cairns Convention Centre is known as the Snakepit, and it is the venue most often nominated by visiting players as the hardest place in the league to win. One jersey has been retired, number 8, worn by Aaron Grabau from 1999 to 2013.
S.E. Melbourne Phoenix
The newest club before Tasmania, founded in 2018 and admitted for the 2019-20 season as the league's ninth team, created to give Melbourne a second club and to reach the city's south-eastern suburbs.
The Phoenix took their first game 91-88 against Melbourne United on 3 October 2019 and averaged over 5,300 a game in their first season, the strongest first-year attendance of any start-up club in Australian basketball. They have made the finals four times — 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2026 — with a best regular-season finish of third in 2025-26, and reached a semi-final in 2026 before losing 2-1 to Adelaide. No grand final yet.
The club's identity is still forming, which is what you would expect of a seven-year-old franchise. It plays at John Cain Arena and at the State Basketball Centre at Wantirna South, and takes fixtures to the Gippsland Regional Indoor Sports Stadium at Traralgon. Owner Romie Chaudhari is also a co-owner of Swansea City.
The name deliberately echoes the South East Melbourne Magic, the 1990s club that won championships in 1992 and 1996 and was merged out of existence. The lineage is thematic rather than legal — the Phoenix are a new club, not a revival — but the choice of name was not an accident.
The Melbourne derby, and the other rivalries
Two clubs in one arena produces a fixture that exists nowhere else in Australian professional sport. Melbourne United against the S.E. Melbourne Phoenix is played mostly at John Cain Arena with one side nominally at home, and the crowd splits the building. It is the best-attended regular NBL night in Victoria and the fixture most worth planning a trip around.
The older rivalries are geographic and historical. Perth against anyone from the eastern seaboard carries the weight of four decades of visiting teams complaining about the flight. Sydney against Melbourne is the two largest markets and the two clubs most willing to spend. Illawarra against Sydney is a small city against a large one, an hour and a half apart, with an entirely different sense of what a basketball club is for.
Tasmania have manufactured a rivalry with almost everybody in five seasons, largely by winning games they were not supposed to win in a building visiting teams dislike. New Zealand against any Australian club carries a trans-Tasman edge that needs no explanation to anyone who follows either country's other sports.
- Clubs with at least one title8
- Clubs with none2
Of the ten clubs contesting the 2026-27 season, eight have at least one championship. Cairns have reached two grand finals without winning; S.E. Melbourne have not yet reached one.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Clubs with at least one title | 8 |
| Clubs with none | 2 |
The benches, and why four of them changed at once
Four of the ten clubs changed head coach ahead of the 2026-27 season, which is a heavy turnover in a competition this size. Trevor Gleeson took over at Adelaide from Mike Wells, Will Weaver replaced Darryl McDonald at Brisbane, Jacob Chance succeeded Dean Vickerman at Melbourne United, and Gordon Herbert came in for Petteri Koponen at the New Zealand Breakers.
The other six carry more continuity. Brian Goorjian, whose coaching career spans four decades of Australian basketball and several of the clubs on this list, is at Sydney. John Rillie is at Perth, Scott Roth remains at Tasmania after leading the club from its first season to its 2024 championship, Adam Forde is at Cairns, Justin Tatum at Illawarra and Josh King at the Phoenix.
Coaching matters more in the NBL than the raw numbers suggest, and the reason is the roster rules. With at most four imports and marquees in an 11-man squad, and a cap that forces at least five cheap contracts, no club can simply buy a better team than its rivals. The margins come from system, development and how well a coach integrates two or three new imports every October into a domestic core that has played together for years.
That is also why the successful clubs tend to keep coaches for a long time and why a bad appointment is expensive. A coach who cannot develop the seventh through eleventh players on a roster is coaching a different league from the one he is actually in.
Who actually owns an NBL club
There is no single ownership model, and the differences explain a great deal about how the ten behave. The league itself is majority-owned by Larry Kestelman, who bought 51 per cent in 2015, but the clubs are separate entities with their own owners, and the league has at times held a club directly while it looked for a buyer.
Some are privately owned by individuals, several of them with interests in other sports — the S.E. Melbourne Phoenix's Romie Chaudhari is a co-owner of Swansea City, and the New Zealand Breakers passed to businessman Marc Mitchell in March 2025. Some are owned by investment vehicles: Tasmania passed from the league to private equity firm Altor Capital in February 2025. Cairns are owned by an incorporated association, which makes them one of the last genuinely community-owned clubs at this level of Australian sport.
This matters because it determines what happens when a club goes wrong, and NBL clubs have gone wrong more often than clubs in the football codes. Illawarra were saved by a supporter campaign in 2009, entered administration in 2015 and were taken over by the league in 2020. Sydney's licence was cancelled outright in 2008. Brisbane's was handed back. The Gold Coast Blaze and Townsville Crocodiles simply stopped.
The current arrangement — a league with a controlling owner sitting above independently owned clubs — is unusual in Australia and it is a direct response to that history. It gives the competition the power to intervene early, to relocate a licence rather than lose it, and to refuse expansion into a market that cannot support a club. The trade-off is that a club's future is never entirely its own.
Where the players come from
Each roster carries 11 fully contracted players, of whom a maximum of four can be imports or marquee signings combined. That means at least seven of every squad are Australian or New Zealand players, and it is why the domestic pathway is not a nice-to-have in this league but the thing the whole competition rests on.
Most of those players come through NBL1, the semi-professional winter tier below the top flight, or through junior state programs and the Australian Institute of Sport tradition that preceded them. Development players — on a minimum of just over 24,000 dollars for NBL27 — sit outside the contracted 11 and are usually NBL1 regulars getting their first exposure to the professional level.
The imports are the variable, and they are where seasons are won and lost. A club has four premium slots, and getting one wrong costs a quarter of its most valuable resource. NBL clubs replace underperforming imports mid-season more readily than European clubs do, which is why a February roster can look meaningfully different from an October one.
The traffic runs both ways at the top. Australians who have played in the NBA come home to it — Matthew Dellavedova captains Sydney, Bryce Cotton and Isaac Humphries co-captain Adelaide — and teenagers pass through it on the way out, through the Next Stars program. That two-way flow is newer than it looks and is the single biggest change in the competition's standing over the last decade. The wider context sits in our basketball archive and in the guide to how the NBA salary cap works, which is the system most NBL imports are measured against.
The clubs that won and no longer exist
Six clubs have won NBL championships and are gone. Their absence is the reason the modern competition is only ten teams, and the reason its history feels older than its club list.
| Club | Titles | Years won |
|---|---|---|
| Canberra Cannons | 3 | 1983, 1984, 1988 |
| North Melbourne Giants | 2 | 1989, 1994 |
| S.E. Melbourne Magic | 2 | 1992, 1996 |
| St Kilda Saints | 2 | 1979, 1980 |
| West Adelaide Bearcats | 1 | 1982 |
| Launceston Casino City | 1 | 1981 |
| South Dragons | 1 | 2009 |
The list is worth reading slowly. The first two championships in NBL history were won by a Melbourne club that no longer exists. Tasmania had a championship club in 1981, forty-three years before the JackJumpers won one. Canberra won three titles in six years in the 1980s and folded in 2003, which is exactly why the capital keeps being named in expansion conversations.
The South Dragons are the strangest case: champions in 2009 and out of the league immediately afterwards, a title-winning club that did not survive the season it won in. That is the clearest possible illustration of what the late 2000s did to Australian basketball.
Others went without ever winning. The Townsville Crocodiles, who reached a grand final in 2001, became financially unsustainable and folded in April 2016. The Gold Coast Blaze folded in 2012. The Singapore Slingers left after 2007-08. Victoria Titans, West Sydney Razorbacks and Sydney Spirit are all names that appear in league records and nowhere else.
Where the eleventh club goes
The NBL has publicly offered an eleventh licence and has not granted one. League owner Larry Kestelman has been consistent about the condition: a market must supply an arena of NBL standard, which he has put at a minimum of roughly 7,000 seats.
Canberra is the most frequently named candidate, partly because the Cannons' history is genuine and partly because redevelopment of the AIS Arena has been discussed with government support. Kestelman has said a two-year timeline would be aggressive but not unprecedented, pointing to the speed of the MyState Bank Arena redevelopment that made Tasmania possible.
Geelong has been described by the league as deserving a team and blocked by the absence of a suitable venue. Darwin and the Gold Coast have both been raised. In every case the constraint has been the building, which is a very different problem from the one the football codes face when they expand — the NRL and AFL argue about markets and broadcast value, while the NBL argues about seats.
The arithmetic also matters. A ten-club league can run a reasonably balanced 33-game fixture. An eleven-club league cannot run the same schedule, and would need a different model with byes or an uneven draw. That is a real reason the league has been slow, not just an excuse.
How to pick a club
If you live near one, that settles it. NBL arenas are small enough that attending is a genuinely different experience from watching, and the difference is larger in basketball than in the football codes — you are close to the floor, you can hear the coaches, and a 5,000-seat building at full voice is louder than a 40,000-seat stadium two-thirds empty.
If you have no local club, style is the next filter. Sydney and Melbourne United have historically recruited for star power and paid for it. Perth and Tasmania have built defensive identities that outlast individual rosters. Illawarra and Cairns develop, sell and develop again, which produces a different kind of season and a different kind of attachment.
The pragmatic answer is to watch a full round rather than highlights, and pay attention to how sides defend rather than how they score. Scoring runs are entertaining and unstable; defensive identity is what a club is actually like to follow across five months.
For the mechanics behind all of this — the salary cap that keeps the ten close together, the import rules that shape every roster and the calendar that puts the season in summer — the NBL explainer covers the competition itself, and the finals guide covers what six of these ten clubs are actually playing for. The Australia section has venue guides across every sport in the country, and the basketball archive covers the wider game.
What on this page is most likely to move
Arena names change constantly in Australia, and several of the buildings listed here trade under sponsor names that were different three years ago and will be different again. The capacities are basketball configurations and are lower than the same venues hold for concerts.
Title counts are stable but the convention behind them is contestable, particularly for Melbourne United, whose six includes four won as the Melbourne Tigers, and for Illawarra, whose two span three club names. Clubs use the continuous count, and so does this page.
Expansion is the live variable. An eleventh licence has been offered and not taken up, and if a market solves its arena problem the shape of the competition changes quickly. Everything else here — the foundation dates, the collapses, the returns, the geography — is settled history, and it is the part that explains why a competition with a 47-year record has only ten clubs in it.