^ I tried to watch BBL couple of times but got bored quickly due to absence of premier players from the Oz squad, No Starc, no Warner, no Smith, no Patty and on some occasion no Maxi... nah sorry BBL.
Not unexpected. BBL salaries are very low, and I am not even comparing them with the IPL. Even CPL and PSL pay much better salaries when compared to the BBL. As far as I know, the highest salary in BBL is $210,000. The salary cap per team (i.e for all the 16 players) is just $1.6 million. On top of that, around 45% of whatever earned by the top players in BBL is deducted as tax by the Australian authorities. So is it even surprising that the star players are skipping the tournament?