The Breakers Are All About The Headlines These Days… Should We Be Worried?
Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable about the direction the Breakers are heading in? Because right now it feels like a lot of things are happening under the Breakers banner that have nothing to do with the community-minded, family-values club that we’re accustomed to.
Obviously new ownership was always gonna make a difference. The growing trend in the NBL is towards a flashier and more commercial model and you had to figure that the humble New Zealand Breakers would catch up sooner or later. It’s either that or run out of money. Chatter about ticket sales and contracts were already predating the new owners. Then Matt Walsh and his mates were introduced with a bunch of excitement and the playoffs came and went as usual… albeit kinda stink with the way the Breakers dropped out in the semis.
But then the Paul Henare thing happened.
A couple weeks later we still don’t have an answer as to what happened there, whether Paulie got a lowball offer intended for him to decline or whether this was his decision to move on after hanging out with the Breakers in one way or another since he was a foundation player. Henare’s with the Tall Blacks now ahead of the Commonwealth Games and he’s not about to talk Breakers dramas. He’s got a medal to win (ideally silver, if all things go as planned) and distractions are not a part of the plan. Nothing’s getting cleared up any time soon from his side. Moving on, then.
Even if the owners wanted to bring in their own guy, even if they shanked Henare in the back to clear up his job, that’s within their rights to do. It’s a business and they clearly have a plan for this club. Unfortunately so far that plan seems to mostly be about pandering to fickle American fans with media gimmicks and novelty gags. For example…
Now, that’s kinda funny. Nobody believes that LeBron James is planning on playing at Spark Arena next season but cities around the USA are playing the billboard game with him while actually thinking it might make some difference to King James’ thinking… so an Auckland edition works as a clever dismantling of that idea as well as a cheeky stab at some viral advertising. Where it gets weird is when you see things like this from the Pardon My Take blokes, also on the ownership group…
This isn’t gonna be one of those articles where a joke is taken out of its intended context and used as evidence against the joker. The Pardon My Take crew have a particular style of doing things and it’s massively popular in America and around the world. But, like, doesn’t it seem like the Breakers are being used as a tool for a punchline there? Like a new toy to play with. The Breakers’ LeBron Recruitment isn’t meant to be taken seriously but at a transitional time for this club, it’s hard not to feel like these jokes are being made at the expense of the team’s existing fans. Keeping it real from a fan’s point of view, here.
All good, it’s a bit of a laugh is all (and our wine really is outstanding, no lies). Except that was only a couple days after Paul Henare left and that split, because of the way it happened, brewed a bunch of theories about his relationship with the new owners – and the locals are always gonna side with the local hero, leaving the powerful foreign owners looking like carpet-baggers. Which is not the best way to start out a relationship with the people who are supposed to be filling out the arena.
And if you doubt their power then take a peek at this and remember how New Zealand’s entire media tried and failed to get an audience with Barack Obama while he was here (only for John Key to hog the golf course). Matt Walsh knows people you don’t know.
One week later and how about this for news? Rick Pitino. Linked with Paul Henare’s old job.
Pitino is one of the most high profile college coaches in American sports (former college coach of Edgar Sosa, no less)… or at least he used to be until he got fired last year. Basically he got snapped amidst an FBI dig into corruption at college basketball programmes, particularly those where Adidas had a presence. Long story here, college athletes are supposed to be amateur but they make millions for their schools so loopholes are plentiful. Sportswear brands unofficially sponsor schools, hence the Adidas thing, which is one way that they get around rules. Suffice to say that Pitino’s player recruitment ideas were less than legal when held up to scrutinising. Everybody else does the same thing, but Pitino got caught.
Dillon Boucher confirmed the Pitino outreach even if Pitino denied it in emphatic fashion – probably focus on the word ‘representatives’ in the Stein tweet. It’s doubtful they ever considered him a realistic possibility but you get a big name beat writer to tweet out about it and you’re in the headlines for another week. Wonder how the hypothetical offer to Pitino compares to the one that Henare got. Wonder what’s gonna happen next week to make headlines.
Curious that Marc Stein has now tweeted a couple times about the New Zealand Breakers, a team which has very little relevance to his regular NBA beat (Stein is one of the top NBA newsbreakers out there, currently working at the New York Times after politics edged him out at ESPN, another long story). Looks like somebody’s got an inside number for the Stein Line, aye?
Speaking of which, amidst all this there was an article on Basketball Forever which dug into the club’s new strategy (in a way that hasn’t really gotten focus elsewhere, for some reason). This is what the GM had to say about it all, aka the most influential bloke in the boardroom who still has a kiwi accent.
Dillon Boucher: “We knew [the billboard] would gain a lot of traction. We knew there would be a bit of a mixed reaction too, that some people would think we were dead serious and that others would know it was a tongue-in-cheek type thing. The main thing for us is that we have a marketing team that’s always looking to try different things and push the boundaries.”
This viral marketing is going to become the norm for the Breakers. Cheeky gimmicks like the billboard and the Obama jersey are fun and quirky, getting the Breakers name out there in places where it’s never been before. You’d imagine the idea is that with basketball being such a branded monster overseas, the Breakers are looking to pump up their credibility among local fans by tapping into the NBA fan culture of doing things. Marc Stein probably got a nice little bonus for his tweeting. But New Zealand fans, used to watching basketball on the scale of LeBron James, might take the local product more seriously (enough to pop up at a few more games) if a little of that LeBron magic rubs off on it.
It’s not a terrible idea. In fact it’s quite a good one. What isn’t so cool is the possibility that a well-liked head coach was edged out so that the club can pursue a morally questionable bloke such as Rick Pitino, whose motivations for taking a gig that would pay him a tiny fraction of what he once got paid are tenuous at the very best, because it’d be a quirky story. Running a championship-aspiring club like fan fiction. At least it hasn't affected the team itself yet.
Like, by all means keep pumping up the brand. But if you take it too far then you isolate the fans and the Breakers are in a strange place where a handful of their minor owners happen to have an enormous media presence, which risks playing these gimmicks way out of proportion.
Gotta assume that these buggers all know what they’re doing… but these are uneasy times to support the Breakers. The family corner store’s been bought up by the franchised conglomerate. Fingers crossed that priorities are all still in the right place.
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