Unpaid wages and walkouts: the downfall of the NBL's Indian Panthers

The Spinoff

16 hours ago

The arrival of the Indian Panthers to the NBL was heralded as a game-changer for basketball in New Zealand. But just nine games into the 2025 season, the Panthers would be suspended from the league following allegations of unpaid player wages. James Borrowdale spoke to the players, owners and league officials for the full story of a doomed campaign.
When Leon Henry heard rumours swirling about a new team looking to join the Sal's National Basketball League (NBL), he was intrigued. It was winter 2024 and the former Tall Black, now 39, had been retired from basketball for a few years and was happy working as a real estate agent and spending as much time as possible with the newborn daughter he had recently welcomed into the world. But it didn't stop his ears pricking up when whispers of a new franchise looking to become the league's 12th team reached him. It is a league with which Henry has had a long association over a legendary career in antipodean basketball, having been a member of seven NBL-winning teams, as well as winning the Australian equivalent in three consecutive seasons with the New Zealand Breakers, and representing the Tall Blacks on 27 occasions.
Based in South Auckland, where Henry lives, the team was to be owned by an Indian basketball league, the InBL Pro, and would, according to a press release issued by the NBL in July last year, mean a 'new team filled with the best players from India', with the roster to be complemented by New Zealand basketballers and other international imports. The NBL – in which a top player can expect to earn up to $40,000 for the roughly four-month season – has acted as a nursery for the country's best basketball talent, including future NBA players Kirk Penney and Steven Adams. But in the nearly half a century of New Zealand's national basketball competition, there'd never before been a license granted to an international franchise, and Henry was curious about the people and philosophy behind this one.
In September 2024, over coffee with Parveen Batish, the Melbourne-based CEO of the InBL Pro, Henry saw its outlines sketched. 'And at the beginning I did believe in it,' he told The Spinoff in a Morningside cafe. 'I believed in bringing it to Takanini because it has a big Indian community… It might have a chance. It's new, it's innovative.'
Justin Nelson, then the head of Sky's NZ Basketball League Management team, and formerly General Manager of the NBL, who was credited in that same press release with hatching the 'outside-the-square' idea, touted the benefits of the expansion in his subsequent press rounds. 'We're dealing with a population of 1.4 billion people and we're dealing with some very clever business people who are behind the Indian National Basketball League [InBL]. They already have runs on the board,' he told Stuff in July 2024. Nelson has since left New Zealand and any administrative role within sport in this country, but when he spoke to The Spinoff from his Melbourne home base he reiterated his belief in the Panthers concept, which he said strove to build on the 'enormous growth' of interest in the New Zealand league throughout Southeast Asia and India.
Henry says he had initially pitched to Batish the possibility that he take on the general manager (GM) position for the new team, though Henry remembers that Batish was more interested in getting the former player on board as an assistant coach for one of the Indian teams for the upcoming season of the InBL Pro. But he says he heard no more about that opportunity, nor about the new team, for months – until, during a second meeting with Batish, which he remembers taking place in November, they were joined by Batish's son Arran. Henry was told the younger Batish, also based in Melbourne, would take the GM position. But Henry was to be the fledgling franchise's man on the ground, his position officially defined as 'ambassador'.
Between those two meetings, however, the earth had begun to move under Henry's significantly sized feet. When the Indian Panthers were granted entry into the NBL, the InBL Pro was scheduled to be completed well within 2024, according to a Basketball New Zealand spokesperson. That would have given Indian players appearing in both leagues ample time to travel to Aotearoa for the preseason programme that begins for most teams, Henry says, in December or January. The Panthers were to play the opening game of the 2025 season on March 12.
But unexplained delays meant the InBL Pro didn't even begin until February 2025. That gave Henry reason to feel 'a little uneasy', he remembers, but he thought the loosely defined ambassador role was a safe option: 'There are not too many commitments, I can come and go as I please.'
Henry's uneasiness mounted as the season drew near and there appeared to be very little infrastructure being built behind the Panthers logo. In his requests for information about what was happening, Henry says he was told that the franchise was looking to forfeit the first four games of the season as it awaited the assembly of their squad following the completion of the InBL Pro. 'I was like, 'Whoa, that's not a good look,'' says Henry. He says he warned Batish that the other NBL clubs – who would have already booked accommodation and venues and sold tickets on the basis of Panther participation – would not be happy if the new franchise wasn't even able to put a team on the court. 'If we do that to enter the league, there are going to be major issues,' he remembers cautioning.
The only way that Henry could envision avoiding those issues was to assemble a temporary squad of local players not yet drafted into other teams. Miles Pearce, the former Tall Black who had been the assistant coach of the Gujarat Stallions team that had won the InBL Pro, was announced as coach, but in the week before the new franchise's first game, Henry was desperately trying to fill the roster with 'social guys that we just had to go with here in Auckland'.
Somewhere along the line, Henry was asked whether he would consider coming out of retirement to inject his experience into the team. 'I was like, 'Oh, play a couple of games, have some fun with these guys? Why not?' So I ended up agreeing to a temporary contract.' Soon, he was named as captain of a team that, a separate source told The Spinoff, was still chasing the signatures of some of its players the morning of its first game, away to the Hawke's Bay Hawks. That Indian Panthers team – beaten, to no one's surprise, by 30-plus points – contained precisely zero Indian players.
Two Indian players – Sejin Mathews and Aaron Blessen – arrived in time for the next game, the Panthers' first on their home court at Takanini's Pulman Arena. But if those two athletes had expected to be integrated into a fully fledged professional franchise, they were sorely disappointed. Between the two games, head coach Pearce announced his abrupt departure from the team. (Pearce didn't respond to email requests for comment for this story.) As captain, Henry says he had tried to distance himself from management and their decisions in an effort to stay in the players' corner; he just shrugged his shoulders when it was announced Pearce had discontinued his role two days before the Panthers' first home game. 'Sometimes, you know, things don't work out quite right and he [Pearce] stepped down,' Batish said at the time.
Into his place, as interim coach, stepped Jonathan Goodman, an Australian who had already been working with the team and who had previously been a part of the InBL Pro recruitment process. In front of several hundred home fans, the Panthers were beaten 93-107 by the Franklin Bulls; a couple days later they were thrashed by the Manawatū Jets, losing by nearly 50 points.
The new coach didn't seem to be doing much at all. Stephen Paea, who played in the majority of Panthers' nine games, said the closest thing the team ever managed to a full-squad training was the nine players who once turned up to 'a morning shoot-around'; never did the Panthers manage even a single five-on-five scrimmage. Ideally, according to Henry, you'd want to put in at least 40 hours of work a week: video analysis, team meetings, two hours on court every day, an hour and a half of weight training, another hour and a half of recovery. Henry says the team asked for a proper schedule outlining some of the above 'every damn week', but never received it. There was a gym membership provided by the only sponsor the Panthers attracted, Fitness Fusion Manukau, but there was no oversight, guidance or even encouragement to use it. In lieu of training, the team would merely assemble at the venue a couple of hours before a game to do what they could as they awaited tip-off.
But even that didn't top the list of the players' worries. Very soon, discussions among players became about payment – specifically, the lack of it. (The Spinoff has seen screenshots detailing these text-message conversations between players, between players and staff, and assertions from the owners – often relayed by Batish – that payment was on its way.) When it did intermittently appear, it came, according to Henry, in direct bank transfers with no income tax deducted, from 'whatever account in Melbourne, Australia'. Still, the players hoped these were merely teething problems, and that those clever business people behind the scenes would sort it out and things would begin to run more smoothly. It was a hope that would become increasingly tested.
Henry, in an effort to build rapport among teammates who hardly ever saw each other, organised a get-together for the players a few games into the season: a couple of beers at one of their homes, then into Ponsonby for drinks. The Indian players – Mathews and Blessen had by now been joined by Tushal Singh – arrived and asked for the wifi password. Henry asked if they were still using their Indian phones. 'They were like, 'Yeah, they haven't even given us SIM cards to contact our families. They haven't given us money to come out tonight.'' This naturally led to conversations as to exactly how the trio were surviving in this country. They were living together in a paid-for Airbnb, with groceries – only $300 to $400 a week to feed the three of them, Henry was told – bought for them, but no income.
Another member of the Panthers set-up described to The Spinoff having breakfast with Mathews, Blessen and Singh at a cafe: the card they had been given to sustain themselves declined, a fact the players had turned into something of a dark joke – would it work today or wouldn't it? Other text messages seen by The Spinoff appear to confirm this account, one thread relaying that the card Mathews, Blessen and Singh had been left with had 'insufficient funds', and trying to source charity supplies for the three athletes, who only had 'enough food for next 2 days'.
Mathews, Blessen and Singh also seemed to confirm something long rumoured: payment had been an issue during and after the InBL Pro, too. One of the Indian players told The Spinoff that he had received roughly 6% of the money he was owed for his work across the two competitions – and that he received that trifling amount long after he'd returned to India. Henry asked why, if they hadn't been paid during the InBL Pro, did they agree to come to New Zealand, and says he was told the Indians had felt pressured to come, something backed up by our Indian source.
'I was like sitting there going, 'OK, this does not look good,'' Henry says. Most of the guys in the room had at least been partially paid for the games they'd played up until that point. But with regards to the Indian players, Henry says two words occurred to him: 'slave labour'. 'There was a bit of shock because we're not used to hearing that, coming from New Zealand.'
(Dushyant Khanna, founder and CCO of the InBL Pro, speaking to The Spinoff from Australia, maintained that everyone currently out of pocket – across both the InBL Pro and the Indian Panthers – would be paid in full. He said the owners had the week prior made payments to about '16 or 20 [Indian] players, and this week there will be another 15 players getting paid, I think. You can't just make 300 payments in one week. There's a process… There's a proper payment plan.'
Batish told The Spinoff that the Indian players' InBL Pro payments adhered to the contracts they had signed, and that he couldn't comment on payments made or not made to the Indian players for their time in New Zealand 'because it's out of my hands. But everything else which was in my hands – to make sure that they were looked after properly, fed properly and so on, 100% they were.')
As the season lurched on, Henry set up a Whatsapp group chat among the players, partly so they could easily communicate as to who had been paid each week. Each loss – the Panthers would never taste victory in their eight attempts – seemed to loosen another bolt on the wheels of the franchise. Under the hood, the engine spluttered also. After six games it was announced American import Alex Robinson, perhaps the team's best player, would be leaving the club. He would later allege non-payment. (Robinson didn't respond to requests for an interview.) The remainder of the Indian players would never arrive. Henry says the so-called temporary players (himself included) were assured that the visas had been applied for or were being processed and that soon their services wouldn't be required. But Henry says he was in touch with some of those Indian players who were now telling him they didn't want to come. After learning about the situation of Mathews, Blessen and Singh, he didn't blame them. 'Were they just going to bring over [the rest of the] Indian guys in the same scenario?'
There were other issues, too: players soon began to hear whispers that the franchise would no longer be able to afford the $15,000 it cost to operate a game at the Pulman Arena. They were forced to move to the Franklin Pool and Leisure Centre, home court of the Bulls, whose hospitality the Panthers were now allegedly reliant on. Other financial issues would emerge, with text messages leaked to The Spinoff alleging that physios weren't being paid. The NZ Herald would later report the complaints of two businesses, Pure Athletic and Makers Merch, who said they were still owed thousands of dollars by the Indian Panthers. Two days before this article went live, the owner of Makers Merch confirmed to The Spinoff that he was still chasing something like $4,000, latterly through the courts.
For Henry, the final straw came during an 11-day break in the team's schedule. Both Arran and Parveen Batish returned to Melbourne, and head coach Goodman went on holiday to Thailand. 'That kinda just triggered me,' says Henry. The players, in that interregnum, continued to try and figure out where they stood and whether they would see the money they were owed. 'We're texting each other during this [break] saying, 'What the fuck is going on? We still haven't been paid, we don't have trainings, and now our coach isn't here?' We were already over it, [thinking] this is fucked.' None of Arran Batish, Parveen Batish or Goodman arrived back in time for the next game, away against the Manawatū Jets. With their coach absent, the Panthers were thrashed by 36 points.
'''What the fuck is going on? We still haven't been paid, we don't have trainings, and now our coach isn't here?''
Internal discussions began about forfeiting the next game, at the Panthers' adopted home against the Canterbury Rams on April 29, to protest the lack of payment and what Paea called the 'shit show' the franchise had become. Henry says it was a 'collective decision' but that in the discussions his line was clear: 'We've got to forfeit this game to make a stand, otherwise shit's gonna continue and it's not gonna look good.' One player, who told The Spinoff they were still owed $1,600, said that management applied pressure to play, and that he received a text that read forfeiting 'would not look good for you' among many unanswered phone calls. But the threats didn't work: the Panthers would never step foot on court again.
Henry's ire was largely focused on the Panthers, but he also blamed the NBL for allowing itself to be put in this position. 'I love the league, but for them to make a mistake like this? I point my finger at them.'
Casey Frank, the former Tall Black who is now a spokesperson for Basketball New Zealand, answered carefully, his responses threading the slalom thrown up by the NDA he says was signed in the wake of the Panthers' demise. The idea of expanding the NBL into foreign markets, he says, had been floating around the league's strategic plans for 'the past few seasons', but the particular conversations with the Panthers ownership group didn't begin until early 2024 and that over the course of that year 'due diligence, including the high-level provision of audited business accounts from the owners of the Panthers, was done to confirm [their] financial standing'.
Justin Nelson told The Spinoff that the scrutiny involved in this deal was more intensive 'than any due diligence I've seen for any team previous to that' during his time in New Zealand. And following that process, the Indian Panthers' bid was presented to the leagues' existing teams. 'They looked at the entry parameters, they looked at what was presented, and they approved the bid.' On October 30 it was officially announced, with much fanfare, that the Indian Panthers would be joining the NBL.
Much of the initial confidence on the Basketball New Zealand side of the transaction, according to Frank, rested on the existence of the InBL Pro, a professional league in which the Panthers' owners had invested 'millions of dollars'. But the problems also began with that same league, and the delays it was subject to. Frank originally told The Spinoff the InBL Pro had been scheduled to be completed by the end of August 2025, but when answering a later email query as to the reasons behind that delay, he emailed a statement containing an entirely new set of dates, writing that it was negotiations between the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) and the InBL Pro that had pushed the start of the season from September to January 2025. Yet in the end, the first fixture wasn't played until the beginning of February and the grand final on March 1 in Delhi, 11 days before the Panthers' first game on the outskirts of Napier. Frank: 'When [the InBL Pro] got delayed, certainly we were concerned… There were communications where we were speaking to them to try to ensure that they would be able to make the tip off and have everything in line… They were confident they were going to be able to do that.'
Frank says the tightness of the timing meant there were worries within BBNZ as to whether that would be possible, especially when a hastily scheduled training camp for India's best players was scheduled by the BFI. But by then there was no alternative. Given the limited time before the beginning of the NBL season, and the arrangements that had already been made, from scheduling to broadcast commitments, there was little to do but try and get the new team ready. 'We were committed and doing our best to help the Panthers get up to speed.'
When – as similarly noted by Henry – the competition had almost begun and there still seemed to be very little organisational hierarchy in place on the ground in New Zealand, optimism was still sought from the fact that 'this was a company that was running a full professional league in India that had a full roster of support and administration staff at that time,' says Frank. 'So we were confident that that infrastructure would be able to be shifted in place for their activity in New Zealand.' Rumours of late payment in the InBL Pro, Frank says, never reached the ears of Basketball New Zealand.
Frank says the NBL was 'consistently working with the Panthers to help them maintain their obligations to the league and doing our best to work with them… to meet their contractual obligations'. But despite that work it wasn't until April 25, according to an NBL statement released the day after the forfeited Canterbury Rams game, that the league was made aware of what it called 'delayed payments to Indian Panthers players and staff'. Nelson told The Spinoff that while there had been rumours before then, it was only on that date they received a written statement, without which it wasn't possible for the league to take action. The NBL statement noted that on the morning of the Rams game, 'the League was informed that a number of Panthers players had received payment, and plans were in place for the game against the Rams to proceed. However, prior to tip-off, Panthers players elected not to take the court, and the League made the decision to postpone the game.'
On May 1, a subsequent statement announced that an investigation was under way. In the meantime, 'the allegations are sufficiently serious, and the evidence is such, that the Commission has decided to suspend the Panthers' participation in the League indefinitely, and effective immediately'. (Frank says 'slave labour' was not an accusation that Basketball New Zealand was ever made aware of: 'Were we to hear that, of course we'd be concerned.')
At the conclusion of that investigation, three weeks later, the Panthers withdrew from the competition. The NBL heralded it with another press release, which relayed that the Panthers had 'accepted responsibility for falling short on delivering the vision and outcomes that were originally presented to the League when being awarded the license last September'. The Panthers contributed a couple of paragraphs to the statement. They read, in part: 'In hindsight, fielding a team abroad for five months has proven more complex than anticipated, and we do not foresee a resolution in the immediate future. Therefore, we have proposed withdrawing from the current season and discontinuing our remaining games.' When asked if he accepted any blame for the mess the Panthers devolved into, Nelson replied with an adamant 'no'. 'What I accept is the same shared disappointment as everybody else that the owners of the Panthers didn't follow through on everything that they promised to deliver.'
'The perception was that it was my fault.' – Parveen Batish, Indian Panthers CEO.
There certainly is a current of thought, shaded by a spectrum of anger, and shared many times with The Spinoff over the reporting of this story, that Batish is in some degree accountable for what happened. It's something he categorically denies. 'One of the things I hold myself highly on is my personal integrity,' he told The Spinoff from London.
Batish says he had no ownership stake in the Panthers. 'I don't have a piece of paper or anything that tells me that I own a share of anything… There was the promise of certain things, which didn't materialise. But at the end of the day, I'm an employee.' Accordingly, he says, he was merely a conduit to the players, passing on promises of payment that were made above him. 'What I'm told by my owners in terms of what's going to happen is what I tell people is going to happen. Now, if those things don't happen, it's not because I've pocketed the money or the money has disappeared. It's because a promise may have been broken to me.'
In Batish's telling, the cash-flow troubles of the Panthers were in large part due to the new franchise's inability to quickly attract the sponsors and fans that would have given the enterprise at least some income. 'Just because you're called the Indian Panthers and you happen to be in a high demographic with Indian people, doesn't mean that people are going to flock to your games,' he says, noting that marketing a new franchise to a community not traditionally invested in basketball was always going to take some time. The mistake of the Indian Panthers, he says, was to underestimate how long that would take. And compounding that problem, of course, was the degree to which the franchise ever lived up to the 'Indian' aspect of its identity. 'Visa issues', the national camp, and even the India-Pakistan conflict that flared into brief war after the Panthers had initially been suspended were all given as reasons for the non-arrival of most of the India players.
When he spoke to The Spinoff on July 4, Batish said that the late payments precipitated by the cash-flow crisis had now all been settled, with the exception of 'something like $800' owed to a single player; even on the date of the forfeited Rams game, he said, there had only been a total of 'between $2,000 and $4,000' owed to players. This is hotly disputed by players and staff The Spinoff has spoken to, who allege no one has been paid fully.
Dushyant Khanna, CCO and co-founder of the InBL Pro, almost seemed to confirm there were still payments outstanding, when he told the Spinoff, also on July 4, that 'I get a lot of text saying, I'm owed 1000, I'm owed 3000. I put everyone [onto] my accounts. They're dealing with reconciling everything, also cross-verifying with my CEO [Batish]… So as soon as he signs them off, that all goes into the system for the payment.'
(Another member of the InBL Pro ownership group, Melbourne businessman Rupinder Brar, whose private Barkly International College was stripped of its registration in 2024 after federal investigators found 'significant non-compliance', was also approached for comment. He never responded, and then appeared to block this reporter's phone number.)
A channel of communication did still exist between the former players and the owners, and some in the Panthers set-up had heard from them that a date in or around the week this story went live would be the day they received final restitution. Some in the Panthers set up were wary of speaking publicly before then; others, like Stephen Paea, say they've been given dates like this before and that they've always passed with no money changing hands. He has little hope things will be different this time.
For Justin Nelson, the Panthers experience hadn't dimmed the confidence he had for trying to bring new things into sport, although it had restated a lesson his career has often taught him. 'For an innovation to be a success, it's not about you, it's about other people and how they deliver it… An innovator delivers something and other people make it a success. So do I regret it? Absolutely not. As soon as we stop innovating in sport, or we stop innovating in life, where do we go?'
Henry, who says he is still chasing payment, has no reason to feel similarly sanguine, though his season did improve. After the demise of the Panthers, he was offered a contract with the Manawatū Jets, with whom he saw out the NBL. It at least served as a kind of palate-cleanser against the lingering aftertaste of the Panthers experience, something which had soured his attitude towards the NBL itself, a competition that has been a huge part of his career and to which he'll always have a profound emotional attachment. '[I was] taught by elders that played in it when it first started… Some of these mentors for me have been in the league since then and taught me as a kid growing up. For me to have this much success in the league, I love the league. But for them to make a mistake like this…
'It pisses me off. I came out of retirement for this bullshit.'