D'Arcy Waldegrave: Sportstalk host on the Indian Panthers NBL game being postponed over payment issues

Indian Panthers CEO Parveen Batish has admitted players were unpaid while appearing for the franchise in basketball's NBL.

League officials say they're considering options regarding the Panthers futures after meetings involving all 12 clubs today.

The new side's game against the Canterbury Rams last night was canned at the 11th hour.

Sportstalk host D'Arcy Waldegrave explains further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Darcy Watergrave Sports Talk Coasters with me, Hey Dares, Hello, Hello,
it's going on with the Indian Panthers and are they
not playing? They're not paying their players. This is a
crazy story. Did this thing just start up? I was
right eight weeks ago, right from the get go, it
was stumbling very late. Addition to the league, the whole

(00:20):
idea of that was a development side with a whole
of Indian players coming over to play out of South
Auckland and the Indian Panthers. And then things started to
go wrong. The first thing that went wrong, they only
turned up with three or four players because suddenly all
of the players that they like signed up got called
into Indian basketball camps for national duty. So suddenly they

(00:41):
got tricked and hobbled by that. And then since then,
well they can't win for a start, it's not ideal,
but they haven't had the full gathered of players, so
that's understand a lot of Keewis and other imports have
been climbing into help out. The coach left even before
the first game started, and then night they didn't even
play in their initial game. There was yeah, there was

(01:04):
talk of a walkout on live TV, but didn't happen
because they didn't play. But what we officially told was
the reason that they no. No one team said we
missed the Oh we couldn't deal with the traffic, and
the other team said, yeah, well we're not We're not
doing this anymore. And so there's been basketball is Zeland
have been with the sales NBL Commission today in meetings

(01:27):
with all twelve teams involved in the NBA. We heard
Nick Mills earlier today saying get them out, but they won't.
They'll work out a way to keep them. And I
suppose when you look at the ramifications of being thrown
out of the league, it comes down to the sponsorship,
It comes down to other teams playing and what they've
promised their sponsors. It's it's very messy, it's very tied up.

(01:47):
The easiest thing to go get out you've been a disaster.
But they can't do that now because presumably the whole
thing is set up, the rosters set up and whatnot
for who plays her. Yeah, they know what the timetable
is and they've ad have planned for renting out of
various courts to go and play it, and so and so,
and there's one guy who claimed on social media to

(02:07):
get paid for two months. So I'm up and I've gone,
and I've gone to the Giants. Where's the due diligence
before you admitted squad? Well, you listen out to the
CEO because he joins us on the show this evening
up after seven o'clock. Yeah, it's messy, and there's a

(02:29):
lot of excuses floating around. There's talk of someone who
has gone into the side, who's got bad blood with
the team, and they are trying to undermine the team,
and they're going out of their way to undermine the team.
But you look back at and you go, this is
a mess. And my first thought when they started this
team off was hey, this is very fast. This is

(02:50):
too quick, too quick, and you cannot climb into something
like this with no preparation and expect things to go. Well,
they won't. You cannot tell they won't. You cannot tell me.
Liz Kiss is a real name. Yeah, I don't know
if it's Leslie or Leicester. I'm not entirely sure's Kiss.
Le's Kiss. That's not a real name. Might be telling

(03:15):
that No, No, I think that's Leicester, but not yet
because he's waiting for another year because he's got to
see out his reads contract, okay, And so what I'm thinking,
and I think of nothing to back this up. What
I'm thinking is Rugby Australia wan, oh, you can't really
afford to pay his contract outside Joe, could you stick

(03:35):
around for another year? And Joe is just going to
knock it out of the past and we'll give you
maybe half of the money that we had to give
him to buy. I don't know this, but I'm just
throwing these ideas in there. But that's what happened. But
it's really good for Australian rugby because Lis Kiss is
an Ass's League player, but he's an Aussie and the
Reds have gone really, really well and a year under

(03:56):
the wing of Joe Schmidt massive the sky to learn
the trade. So it's a good news story for Australian rugby.
And it's not Eddie Jones. And again it's not a key.
We thank you Darsky. I appreciate any day it's not
Eddie Jones, is a good day. Dusky water Grave Sports
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(04:19):
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