5 Takeaways from the 70th Senior National Basketball Championship

The 70th Senior National Basketball Championship 2019 concluded last night at the Guru Nanak Stadium in Ludhiana, Punjab.

The nation's premier championship saw the participation of 29 men's teams and 24 women's teams from across the country. By the end of it, favourites Railways women and Punjab men returned as champions.

But beyond these simple headlines, there were some other interesting takeaways from this historic event, that dates back to 1934!

Here are my five takeaways from the 70th Senior National Basketball Championship 2019:

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(Dis)honourable Mention: Zero Stats

Globally, basketball as a sport has been at the forefront of incorporating data analytics. The NBA is well known for leading the way through making advanced statistics readily available, leading to deeper understanding of the game and its players, for all its fans. For developing countries like India, stats also allow the basketball community to track the overall growth of the sport relative to previous decades.

The Senior Nationals are vital tournaments because the performances here dictate the India team selections in upcoming international tournaments. However, the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) continues to believe in the 'oral tradition', by being remarkably careless about maintaining a database of past events, as well as of individual game stats. Case in point: The BFI website, which is still to update any of the key knockout round results despite the Senior Nationals having already concluded.

Even the data which has been uploaded on the BFI website are simply final scores, without any mention of quarter wise score breakups, top scorers, or leaders in specific categories like rebounds, assists, steals or blocks.

For conversations around Indian basketball to grow within the larger sporting community, it is vital that such a glaring lapse is addressed quickly, including plugging of legacy data.

#5 Freezing cold

The Senior National Basketball Championships have traditionally been played in the last week of December-first week of January. I have been told that these dates were fixed keeping in mind the Christmas-New Year break, giving most participants a chance to attend without having to skip their office/school.

But this year, with the Nationals being held in wintry Punjab, the cold became a serious issue for players/teams (especially from south India) who are generally not used to dealing with the same. Moreover, barring the 'Level 1' games that were held in the indoor stadium, the lower 'Level 2' games must have been played on the outdoor courts, which would have been much colder!

Despite that, it is admirable that South teams like Kerala and Tamil Nadu still managed to reach the finals in the women and men's sections respectively.

#4 Rise of Punjab/MP Women

Traditionally, the Senior National Basketball Championships sees teams like Railways, Kerala, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu finish among the medals. This year, it was the turn of the Punjab and Madhya Pradesh women's teams to make their mark.

While the Punjab women's team benefited from the talented young international duo of Anmolpreet Kaur and Harsimran Kaur Dhami, Madhya Pradesh was led by its latest international debutant Nima Doma Bhutia.

Considering how dominant their male counterparts have been at the Senior level, it is especially heartening to see the Punjab women's team elevating their status, after years of sub-par performances. Six-time National Champions Punjab women, who were dominant in the late 70s and early 80s, last won the Senior Nationals way back in 1983!

#3 Punjab men win at home after 25 years

The last time the Punjab men's team won a Senior National Championship as hosts was in 1994. Prior to that, they had won at home way back in 1951! Overall, the Punjab men's team have been crowned Senior National champs 11 times, including winning the last two editions. Like the Railways women's team (see below), can they three-peat next year?

#2 Railways women too strong?

Railways has always been the most dominant women's team in the history of the Senior National Basketball Championship, being crowned champions a whopping 30 times! But with the addition of the nearly 7ft tall Poonam Chaturvedi, and the superstar Shireen Limaye, from Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra respectively, Indian Railways has just gotten a whole lot stronger. This is a double whammy because the transfer of these two 'franchise' players has also made their previous state teams weaker.

Case in point: 2015 champs Chhattisgarh finishing winless and getting relegated to Level 2. Railways' dominance may seem impressive on the face of it, but it is also a sorry indictment of the lack of professional employment opportunities for women basketball players in India. While men have the option of sports quota jobs in public sector banks, Armed Forces and 'navratna' oil companies like ONGC, women have to almost exclusively rely on Railway jobs (the only notable exceptions to this being Kerala State Electricity Board, Thiruvananthapuram & MTNL, Delhi).

#1 Punjab men too tall?

This final takeaway is related to the previous one on the Railways women's team being too strong. But in Punjab's case their strength is a direct correlation to being visibly taller than opposition teams.

Till a few years ago, some of Punjab's top centres/power forwards like Amritpal Singh (ONGC, Dehradun), Amjyot Singh (Indian Overseas Bank, Chennai) and Jagdeep Singh Bains (injury) were unavailable. But their return to the fold, coupled with the likes of upcoming PF/C's like the 6'10 Princepal Singh, has meant that an always formidable Punjab frontcourt has gotten even bigger. Let's not forget that the Punjab men's team at these Nationals was missing the services of their biggest name- the 7'2 Satnam Singh- who is under provisional suspension for having failed a dope test.

The fact that all these Bigs are also very skilled at their respective positions makes this Punjab roster one of the most feared sides of the country. If the team can maintain this core, we could be looking at a dynasty heading into the 2020s.