Three times more NBL court time left the league than changed clubs

Why this was worth a look

Every off-season is reported as a series of signings, one name at a time, and I wanted to know what the whole thing added up to. The question I could not answer from the news was simple: how much of last season is still here.

What is being counted

A player is Punt records which club lists a player for the coming season. The lists here were read on 20 September 2026, the day after the season opened, and clubs keep signing after that.on an NBL27 list if a club has named that player for 2026-27. Their 2025-26 club is worked out from the game log: the club they played the most games for that season. Court time is the minutes a club's players actually played for it across the 33-game regular season, which is derived from the box score and counts time on court, not how good the player was. Finals are left out because the number of finals varies from club to club.

Most of it does not go to a rival

Split every one of last season's 66,482 regular-season minutes by where the player who played them is now. 36,177 of them, or 54.4%, are back at the same club. 8,009, or 12%, are at a different NBL club. 22,295, or 33.5%, belong to players who are not on any NBL list for 2026-27.

That last group is the one the trade talk misses. Roughly a third of the league's court time did not move between clubs at all. It left the competition, for the NBA, for Europe, for Asia, for retirement or for a contract nobody has signed yet, and the NBL's own tables cannot say which.

Adelaide kept a squad. Cairns built one.

The Adelaide 36ers return 83.2% of last season's minutes, the most of the ten clubs, and lost only 354 minutes to players now off NBL lists. Tasmania is next on 82.3%. At the other end, Melbourne United return 32.0% and Cairns 32.5%.

The two low clubs got there differently, which is the part a single percentage hides. Cairns signed eight of the 25 players who changed NBL club, more than any other club and nearly a third of the league's entire inter-club movement, and kept four of the players who played for Cairns last season. Melbourne United signed two, and simply lost 2,545 minutes to players on no NBL list.

The NZ Breakers are the cleanest case of the league-wide pattern. The Breakers signed three players from other NBL clubs and lost not one minute to another club, yet still return under half their court time: 3,504 minutes went off NBL lists altogether.

The 25 who changed clubs

Sorting the movers by what they scored last season shows how top-heavy the list is, and how short the heavy part is.

Milton Doyle is the highest scorer among them, at 16.2 points a game for Melbourne United across 35 games, and is now listed by Illawarra. Six of the 25 averaged double figures last season. Thirteen of them averaged under four points a game, which is the honest shape of inter-club movement: a few rotation players and a long tail of depth.

What this cannot tell you

A list is not a rotation. These numbers count the minutes a club kept, not whether a coach will give them out the same way, and a club that returns 83% of its court time can still change completely in how it plays. Nothing here counts the 46 players on NBL27 lists with no NBL game since 2020-21, where Punt's data starts, because the competition they came from is not in these tables — and those 46 are a third of every player listed. The 2025-26 NBL season, round by round is the ladder these same squads produced before any of them moved. If the feed ever recorded where a departing player went next, I would come back and split that 33.5% into the leagues that took it.