NBL24: Inside the Adelaide 36ers’ tumultuous off-season and incredible supporter anomaly

It’s been more than two decades since their last NBL title, they haven’t made the playoffs in five years and the promise of a history-making victory over NBA club Phoenix Suns at the beginning of last season evaporated into on and off-court struggles within the team.

For the majority of sporting clubs, it’d be a recipe for disaster.

But the 36ers have built a product that has become results-proof.

Here, coach CJ Bruton discusses a tumultuous off-season rebuild and his future, while general manager of consumer business Ben Demertzis delves into the record-smashing support of Adelaide fans.

The toughest mission

“Putting it together was definitely a mission.”

CJ Bruton might be one of the most decorated players Australian players ever but, as he enters his third season as an NBL head coach, calling what he’s endured a baptism of fire is an understatement.

The six-time champion took the helm at Adelaide just two weeks before the start of the Covid-ravaged NBL21 season; after a teenage Josh Giddey made his first steps into the NBA, then-centrepiece Isaac Humphries battled injuries that restricted him to just six games, and imports Todd Withers and Dusty Hannahs struggled to adjust to the rigours of the Aussie league.

Last year’s sophomore campaign was off to a raucous start when the Sixers jetted to Phoenix and made world headlines by lighting up the Suns and becoming the first NBL club to beat an NBA team.

With that wonderful achievement, Bruton’s squad was immediately slapped with the “title favourites” tag. He now acknowledges that crushing weight of expectation was too much to bear for a playing group that had not meshed, as it struggled with ego and personality clashes.

The background turmoil hit a flashpoint with Craig Randall’s histrionics and the inevitable sacking of the wildly-talented but volatile American guard. It didn’t get much better as the Sixers stumbled to finish third-last. Add to all that a daily social media pile-on from passionate but ill-informed Filipino fans, desperate for tall-but-raw countryman Kai Sotto to play 40 minutes a night and take every shot. It grated on players and the club throughout his two underwhelming seasons in Adelaide.

Hoping, even praying, for a clean run at the off-season before a critical contract year for the 47-year-old coach, Bruton could be forgiven for thinking he’d broken a few mirrors, walked under a ladder and spilt the salt.

First, he was forced to go to NBA Summer League in Las Vegas with all three of his import slots tied up, as the conscious uncoupling with Robert Franks dragged on.

“I don’t think, at any point, it has been super easy,” Bruton tells CODE Sports of his off-season roster build.

“What was really hard was knowing as I went to the States that I just didn’t have an answer about ‘Robo’.

“The team goal didn’t shift but he was chasing an opportunity to get as much value out of his play as he could.”

Bruton is one of the nicest people you will meet in the NBL, so that’s his polite way of saying that Franks was looking to make bank.

“Each to his own. When you sign guys, you know that can happen,” Bruton continues.

“He tried to go to Russia (before he’d even played a game), so we knew early that this could be on the cards.

“But he was still contracted, so you’re at Summer League and you’re in two minds.”

Franks eventually secured a job in Japan and Bruton finally had his vacant import spot. He was prepared to make his move.

Then, the search for one import became a scramble for two when reigning NBL Defensive Player of the Year Antonius Cleveland asked out, a week away from pre-season tip-off.

“With Cleveland, it was a great opportunity for him and you can’t do anything about it,” Bruton says of the uber-athlete, who signed with Israeli powerhouse Maccabi Tel Aviv.

“When you play as well as he played for us, I’m sure if I was in that same situation, I’d have to consider that at that stage of his career.

“I also thought there was still a chance he might be here, he wanted to be in Adelaide, he said that all the way to the end. But when a EuroLeague team comes knocking, for his journey, we didn’t want to be a club to stand in the pathway of that.

“I definitely felt for our fanbase and our team because the dynamics, how we play and how I look at things, changed again.”

The great force behind the Sixers

There’s something brewing in Adelaide, at least off the court.

South Australians cannot get enough of the Sixers.

They broke a membership record last season of just under 4,700 and that’s been smashed this week, with the club ticking over 5,000 members when their first home game isn’t until October 1.

It’s a phenomenon that has pleased the club’s general manager of consumer business Ben Demertzis; and left figures at other NBL clubs scratching their heads, with some even approaching the Sixers for insight into how they’ve furnished such a dedicated fanbase.

“Prior to working at Adelaide, I was at Port Adelaide for 10 years, so in the AFL industry, you see what happens: if a team’s results go down, so do the crowds, in 99 per cent of cases,” Demertzis says.

“Last year, you would have thought when we were slowly slipping out of the finals picture, people might lose interest, but we just kept getting more and more fans wanting to come and support the team and experience what happens at our games.”

He’s not wrong. Long shots to make the top six on the back end of last season, the Sixers produced five straight sellouts, culminating in a record 9,558 piling through the Adelaide Entertainment Centre turnstiles to watch them knock over the eventual champion Sydney Kings.

The club has worked on reconfiguring seating to add an extra 50 or so, which puts another record of more than 9,600 in the frame in NBL24.

Adelaide has invested in an expanded marketing department and revamped its game day experience. Sixers owner Grant Kelley’s 2019 decision to make the move from Titanium Securities Arena to the bigger stadium has been more than justified, as the club approaches a 50 per cent increase in membership across those four seasons.

Membership requests flooded in as soon as the final buzzer sounded on last season. The Sixers had to expedite their NBL23 memberships to meet demand, with a remarkable 97 per cent of last season’s reserve seat-holders already paid up.

“It’s been unprecedented, what’s happened with our member numbers,” Demertzis says.

“We’ve already got more than where we ended last year’s membership and we’re still two months away from our first game.

“We had 87 per cent reserved seat renewal last year and that was a high retention number. To have 97 per cent, so far out from the season, is unheard of.”

Demertzis is projecting the club to eclipse 6,000 members in NBL24. The Sixers are among several NBL teams working with Ticketek on a ticket resell option to add value to memberships and, importantly, fill empty seats when members don’t turn up to games.

“It’s still in a trial period, but we’re hoping to have it up and running by the start of the season where members who can’t attend games can put their tickets back into the pool for an incentive,” he says.

“From our point of view, we genuinely sold out the last five games of last season, as in you could not buy another ticket, but we’re still reliant on members showing up for it to be a full house.

“We understand when we’re selling out games, there are times when members can’t get to them and while we’re still working through it, the incentive to sending their ticket back into the pool might be something like credit toward their membership the next season.”

A new roster

Bruton and the Sixers moved quickly once Cleveland’s buyout was complete, adding San Diego State University products Jamaal Franklin and Trey Kell within days to complete their roster. Kiwi big man Tohi Smith-Milner is yet to be officially announced but is a done deal.

Online basketball sleuths quickly raised questions about Franklin, a noted scoring machine in China and the Philippines, whose last job with PBA club Converge FiberXers ended in acrimony when he was cut on the eve of their playoffs.

For a club that had to part ways with a troublesome import not a year ago, the optics aren’t ideal. Yet Bruton and chief executive Nic Barbato both feel assured that the former Memphis and Denver NBA man arrives with a clean slate and an opportunity to bring a winning culture to a city that has, for so long, been starved of success.

“I said all along in the off-season we needed a (late-game) closer,” Bruton says.

“Losing Cleveland and Franks, we lost the two top scorers in our group, so, to find scoring in Jamaal was key.

“Where he’s at in his career, he could have easily gone back to China where he could make three times as much money.

“He’s never played in Australia. It’s an intriguing opportunity for Jamaal to help change the culture of our club and for his own personal growth and development.

“No one wants their name tarnished. When you go to play somewhere, every player’s trying to make that team better and better themselves along the way.”

With Franklin comes Kell, who has built a reputation as an elite performer on the European circuit but struggled through an injury-interrupted debut season in the NBL with South East Melbourne.

There’s a familiarity between the pair. They are under the same Slash Sports representation, as well as sharing their college roots.

Anyone who watched Kell at the Phoenix in NBL23 could see he had more to give. He has publicly acknowledged frustration at failing to produce his best.

“At the Phoenix, Trey had to play a role; he’s been a winner everywhere he’s been but that’s Mitch Creek’s team,” Bruton says.

“They had Gary Browne handling the ball and big Sauce (Alan Williams) down in the block.

“He was a utility player at times and to be able to recruit someone like that, we think he can showcase his full package as someone who can play multiple positions, handle the ball, create for others and be able to defend multiple spots.”

That pair arrives with a number of faces who will be familiar to Adelaide fans.

Athletic big Jacob Wiley, whose daughter Layla was born in Adelaide during his stint with the Sixers in NBL19, returns and provides much-needed outward intensity to the squad.

Humphries, who during NBL23 inspired the basketball world by becoming the only professional male player in a major league to come out as gay, returns healthy and more mature. He has unfinished business and a desire to be the player who was a dominant force alongside Giddey in NBL21.

Kelley and Bruton pulled off a huge coup when they lured highly-regarded fitness boss Nik Popovic to the club. Popovic has revamped the high performance program and was a key factor in Humphries’ decision to return, given he’d aided the 211cm giant through his rehabilitation from a serious foot injury that wrecked the best part of two seasons.

Much-loved Aussie point guard Jason Cadee, who the Sixers brought back to provide leadership for the new group, was signed early and the club targeted hardened underdogs in Smith-Milner and Alex Starling.

Starling has spent most of his life in Adelaide as a prolific import in the second-tier competition but he naturalised earlier this year, allowing him to play as a local in the NBL.

Also on the Sixers roster are veteran Aussie star Mitch McCarron, defensive dynamo Sunday Dech and emergent youngsters Nick Marshall and Kyrin Galloway; and there’s still hope they can become the eighth club of NBL24 to lock in a Next Star.

On the sidelines, Bruton has two new assistants after the departures of Jamie Pearlman and Mick Downer. Club legend Scott Ninnis and Craig Simpson – who crossed from South East Melbourne and was instrumental in the recruitment of Franklin, having coached him in China – will be Bruton’s key supports.

From ‘favourites’ to underdogs?

The club is absolutely humming off the court, but what will the Sixers look like on-court this season?

Some fans have expressed pessimism over the new roster and one league source told CODE that they held concerns over the Sixers’ shooting and roster balance. With a ball yet to be shot in anger, the proof will come in the play.

Instead of going into the season with the ‘title favourites’ tag, Bruton is happy for pundits to underrate the squad he’s put together.

“The process now is we’re obviously not going to the States (to play NBA teams) and we’ll have that opportunity to build toward the season from day one, with the right people in place who want to be here,” he says.

“Ultimately, it will come down to working out how we share and play together.”

So, do they start Wiley at the four and Isaac Humphries at centre? Can those two predominantly-inside players coexist on the floor?

Is Kell able to play the three, or even the four if one of Humphries and Wiley comes off the bench? Who is the primary ball handler? Can McCarron rediscover his best form playing off the ball more?

Where does the development of Galloway and Marshall fit in?

And most importantly, can they all just get along?

Those questions, and plenty more, are what Bruton will spend the next eight weeks attempting to answer, in a bid to hit the ground running when the Sixers’ season tips off in Brisbane on September 29.

What’s next for CJ?

In the final year of his contract, Bruton is well aware of what’s at stake.

It’s tough for coaches to hold on for three years without making the playoffs. He has plenty of available excuses but refuses to use any.

“Things happen, and you’ve got to find a way to manage and make the best of the opportunity and what’s in front of you,” he says.

“I love Adelaide and love the team.

“The game of basketball has taken me all across the globe and while not every season’s going to be a perfect season, it’s about learning from every opportunity.”

From the outside looking in, Bruton seems unflappable, with a resilience built through a playing career that rivals almost any in NBL history.

“You’ve got to take stuff in your stride. I don’t get too high, I don’t get too low, I understand there’s lessons and you need to make adjustments along the way,” he says.

“You need to be true to who you are.

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“Through my journey as a coach, I like to think that I maintain good relationships with players and try to get the best out of everyone, even if I can say I haven’t always achieved that.

“I’m excited for the players who are coming into the club.

“I’ll control what I can control, try to deliver what I say I’m going to deliver, hold everyone to the highest standard and they need to do the same for each other.”