Cairns Taipans

The Cairns Taipans have two reasons to raise their voice. Against the Brisbane Bullets it is the standard Queensland argument. Against Townsville, now playing as the Heat but remembered here as the Crocodiles, it is closer to home: the North Queensland Derby.

The Taipans have gone through a Grand Final series twice, in 2010–11 and again in 2014–15, and lost both times to the same team, the New Zealand Breakers. What they do have from that second final run is the minor premiership, taken with a 21–7 record in 2014–15, the first time a regional club had finished top of the National Basketball League ladder since Geelong in 1984.

The club spent its early years as a community-owned, not-for-profit body, Taipans Basketball Incorporated. It nearly did not survive December 2008, when voluntary administration forced pay cuts on the playing group and cost head coach Alan Black his job. By May 2025 the club was in advanced talks to move to private ownership.

No player wore the shirt longer than Aaron Grabau, 406 games across a career that left him holding the club's rebounding and steals records and his number 8 retired. Anthony Stewart scored more than anyone else to pull on the jersey, 3,187 points in all.

The Cairns Convention Centre, known locally as the Snakepit, is where both runs to the final were made, in a city that had no NBL team at all before 1999.