INDONESIA
Introductions
With a population exceeding 235 million people, Indonesia is the world's 4th most populous nation. Unfortunately, Indonesia's global impact on the world of sports is not proportional to its population. Of all sports, Indonesia has been most successful in badminton, winning world championships and Olympic medals regularly. Soccer is king though when it comes to overall popularity. While not as popular as these two sports, basketball is probably in the top five or seven sports in the country. Interest boomed in the early 90s with the rise of the global Nike/Jordan brand. Successful Muslim players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Hakken Olajuwon helped further the growth of the sport.
Indonesia is consistently the second best team in Southeast Asia behind the Philippines. In the 2009 Asia Championships Indonesia finished 15th out of 16 teams, beating only Sri Lanka in 15th place game.
Leagues
The main league in Indonesia is the National Basketball League (NBL), or Liga Bola Basket Nasional in Indonesian. 2010 is the first season that the league is operating under this name. It used to be called the Indonesian Basketball League, and before that was the Kobatama League. In the 90s there were import players in the league, but that is not the case these days. The league consists of 10 teams from across Indonesia. The league has an interesting format in which once a month all ten teams come to one location and play five games during the week at the same venue. Attendance has been extremely good this season with some games selling out the 5,000 seat arena in Solo.
The NBL is operated by the company DBL Indonesia. This organization, backed by the Jawa Pos media conglomerate, also runs the Development Basketball League. The DBL is a huge organization that runs high school basketball competitions for over 25,000 students around the country. They estimate that over 400,000 spectators came out to watch games last year. While it is unusual for the lower level program to run the premier league, there is great hope that this move will solidify the future of professional basketball in Indonesia by providing the funding to the league, developing players at the grassroots level, and by converting more fans to the game.
The team Satria Muda also participates in the ASEAN Basketball League. Unfortunately, players on the ASEAN League roster are unable to play in the NBL at this time. Satria Muda currently has two imports from the USA and two or three from the region. The team has an avid following and fills the arena during home games.
Sources
Asia-basket Indonesia Page - Updates and scores from around the country. Hopefully this is a well updated section as I am the one who does it!
Jakarta Globe Basketball Articles - The best English language reporting on games. Coverage is sporadic at best.
NBL Website - Mostly in Indonesian, this site has all of the latest scores and a complete statistics database.
DBL Website - Also mostly in Indonesian, it is interesting to peruse and get a sense of the massive and complex network the DBL has created in such a short time.
