Underdogs no more: How the Tasmania JackJumpers became NBL champions

The JackJumpers' championship triumph in just their third season is already remarkable, and it's a win that goes beyond the basketball court for the state of Tasmania.

What is it that makes an underdog?

In sports, that usually means a less talented team taking on an opponent that they have no right beating. If the underdog fights their way to a respectable loss, they’re applauded; if they somehow win, they’re beloved.

For the Tasmania JackJumpers, though, the label goes deeper. In a lot of ways, this team never should have been viewed as underdogs. They were one of only three clubs to have multiple All-NBL selections, and they had the highest-scoring trio of any team.

And yet, ahead of the grand final series, they were still branded with that underdog tag — their run was a fairytale, and they were the league’s Cinderella team. It’s a label they were slapped with the day Tasmania’s NBL licence was announced, when the viability of a team in the state was questioned. It’s one they kept as their name was ridiculed, and their inaugural roster was dissected and downplayed; and it’s one that stayed even as they outperformed expectations in each of their first three seasons.

Underdogs, no more. Instead, they’re the champions of the NBL, lifting the trophy in just the club’s third season.

JackJumpers head coach Scott Roth knows that his team has always been underestimated, and he smartly embraced it. He figured out quickly that Tasmanians are born underdogs, often the butt of mainland Australia’s jokes and always feeling like they’re disrespected. The quickest way to their hearts was to lean into that, something he continued to do even after they made the finals in their first two campaigns. 

“I’m happy with the squad – we’ll get picked tenth again, and we’ll do what we have to do, and if we finish there we do, if we don’t, we’re all good,” Roth said ahead of this season.

It was slightly tongue in cheek from the coach, but while no one was predicting a last-place finish before the season started, they also weren’t anointing the JackJumpers as a genuine contender. Three of the nine experts polled in the NBL’s preseason predictions expected them to miss the finals. None tipped them to win the title, while ESPN’s Olgun Uluc said that “the lack of top-end talent makes it feel like the ceiling is capped”. 

Those were reasonable concerns even as late as mid-January, as Tasmania’s season teetered on the brink. A loss to Illawarra dropped their record to 11-11, and with a logjam through the middle of the NBL ladder, they were at a crossroads. They played hard and never got blown out – their biggest loss across the regular season was by eight points – but they couldn’t close out wins that they sorely needed.

“I believe in our group, [but] whether or not we can solve that in six games, to be quite honest with you, I have no idea,” Roth said following that loss. “Winning, and winning in crunch time, is an art, it’s a thing that’s ingrained in people that win, and you just figure out ways to get across the line, and we just haven’t been able to do that.”

That statement is almost laughable looking back now, with Tasmania’s late-game brilliance powering them through the postseason. They did everything the hard way, coming through the play-in, closing out both the semi-final and grand final on the road, and regularly playing from behind. After a game one blowout that caught them on the back foot, the final four games of the grand final series were decided by a total of 11 points; they won the big moments in three of those four, besting runaway regular-season champs Melbourne United when it mattered most.

Basically, they played like the underdogs, scrapping and fighting to keep games close and then digging deep down the stretch. United led for more than 62% of the series’ total game time, but when push came to shove, it was the JackJumpers that made that late push and willed themselves to victory.

“You look at our club, our group, our fanbase, our state,” captain Clint Steindl said after game five, and that “they probably wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

The unlikely heroes

Every season, an unlikely hero emerges from the fire of the postseason. Think Angus Glover in game five of the grand final for Sydney last season, or Yudai Baba’s burst off the bench for Melbourne in 2021; players that are capable, but that weren’t expected to be the stars on the biggest stage.

Tasmania needed that hero more than most.