What Exactly Is Going On With This Paul Henare Thing?
At least we had some inkling that new owners were on the way when that thing happened. The NBA/Podcasting angle was something stunning but the sale of the club was known business. Paul Henare kinda suddenly just declining to extend his Breakers head coaching contract on the other hand… that was a rib-rocker from the blind side.
The short and sweet of it is that Paul Henare has rejected any offers to extend his expiring contract at the Breakers. The anonymous team source quoted in the initial Fox Sports article that broke the story cited a message he left with the club ownership:
“I will not be looking to re-sign with the club for next season. I wish the club the best for the future and thank the Breakers family for all the support over the last 15 years.”
He does intend to continue as the Tall Blacks coach but is rumoured to be looking for another coaching job overseas. The Cairns Taipans gig is free after Aaron Fearne was let go and that’s the one job that’s been mentioned from the jump. Henare leaves the Breakers with a 29-27 record as head coach, making the playoffs once and missing the other in his two seasons. Before that, of course, he was a championship winning assistant and before that a championship winning player.
Okay, so that’s the band-aid torn off, probably taking a little skin with it. The real question it: Why? Why has he left now? What prompted this? If you’re thinking of chucking it at the feet of the new owners then know that they were pretty swift to say they don’t envisage any sweeping changes to the team this offseason and were more than happy to keep Henare on board and support him. Of course that doesn’t mean that just because they were happy to work with him that he was happy to work with them. And simply saying such and making him an offer doesn’t mean that everything’s all genuine either.
(not sure how much stock you put in Homicide’s views, but that’s one possibility)
Matt Walsh: “We have been in discussion with Paul about a new deal, but he has decided to pursue other opportunities. Paul was offered a contract extension during the season which he turned down, and I have since been in further discussions with him, but he has made the decision to move on. We wish Paul all the best in the future and thank him for his huge contribution to the club, on and off court.”
It’s not been long for him to have already fallen out with the new owners but then you never know what goes on behind closed doors and we don’t know what the offer was that he received either. Nobody’s really spoken about any of this in public yet, Henare especially, so speculation’s all we’ve got to go on. There’s also the option that he sees himself making a good career of this coaching thing and wants to advance himself – something that he’d need to leave to achieve, since there’s not exactly much upward mobility in Aotearoa when he already has both full professional roles available.
This theory makes the Cairns Taipans thing a head-scratcher because that’s surely only a lateral move. Presumably an inconvenient one as well, he’s all set up with the Breakers with a roster that’s got his fingerprints on it. He’d be going from a playoff team to a non-playoff team too… although that’s not such a big deal in a small league with plenty of fluctuation between seasons. But it still doesn’t make much sense. Not unless Cairns is a convenient lifeboat after he jumped ship in Auckland.
Then again, who says the Cairns thing is true anyway? There’d be a clash there with some of his Tall Blacks duties which the Breakers were cool with but the Taipans might not be. And it seems like the Tall Blacks are his number one. That’s the job that he’s protecting amidst all this. If it came down to a choice between the Tall Blacks and Breakers then he’s already made that choice. Not saying it did but he was juggling two significant positions there and Matt Walsh & Mates obviously have some significant commercial interests in all this, it ain’t gonna be run like a family business any longer, so that might have been a conflict in their eyes. It’s already been said that Cairns expect their new coach to play a big part in offseason community engagement and all those things that help sell tickets. But Henare’s gonna be at the Commonwealth Games and trying to qualify for a World Cup during the offseason, so yeah.
Hopefully Paul Henare fronts up to the media in the coming days or chucks out a statement or anything to clear a few things up. No hurry, he’s probably got stuff to figure out first, but right now it really feels like this must have been a clash with ownership. Like, if he was planning on testing himself in Europe or America then he’d surely need to tank the Tall Blacks job and he doesn’t want to do that… which has to remove that professional development incentive, you’d imagine.
And it’s not like the Breakers won too many games after the new owners took charge. We don’t know how long they were hovering around for previously but they bought a championship pedigree team and then watched it get swept in the playoffs. That’s their perspective. Add that to the fact that these are all American jokers coming stomping in and then think about the American dominance of the sport globally and then think about the players that Shawn Marion and Matt Walsh must have links to when it comes to assembling next season’s squad and then think of some of the coaches they must know.
Paul Henare isn’t the best basketball coach in the NBL but he’s the best one in Aotearoa. Thing is, Matt Walsh isn’t limited to fishing for the biggest fish in a small pond and that could be where this whole thing fell apart. Maybe one day we’ll find out, one way or another.
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