What’s To Make Of That Wild, Chaotic (And Nearly Heroic) Breakers Season?
It started amidst the dark and stormy clouds of chaos and it finished with warm beams of hopeful sunlight peeking through as the Breakers entered the final round of the season still in with a chance of making the semis. A possibility which halfway through things seemed about as likely as the sport of basketball one day getting adequate funding in this country as the Breakers lingered at 4-10 with little sign that it was gonna get any better. But it did. Substantially. The lads then won five in a row and would finish with a 15-13 record, only missing out on the semis via points differential in the end.
Such a season of two halves... which makes it such a weird kind of season to get a handle on. Especially when the brilliance of the last few weeks also highlights what could have been if only things had been a tad more stable in the early days of the season. A few too many self-inflicted wounds coupled with unavoidable injuries and scheduling dramas came back to bite them when one single further win would have put them into the playoffs. So close and yet so completely bonkers.
But if we consider where we were in mid-December compared to now then there’s plenty to be excited about. Somehow the simpler things became for them, the better they performed. Eventually they were winning essential games despite basically only having a six-man rotation. Scotty Hopson was absolutely unbelievable, living up to his reputation as a guy on the very fringes of the NBA. Tom Abercrombie had his best season... possibly ever in a Breakers jersey. Definitely his best since the championship days – the dude had a 50/40/90 season! It was a delayed start for Finn Delany with injury but he ended up having a massive breakthrough year... while Brandon Ashley and Rob Loe made for a quality big man rotation and Sek Henry did the dirty work for everybody else. Less was more. With a reliable core of players we saw an uncomplicated system, playing to the strengths of a few main fellas, and with that coach Dan Shamir finally got to flex what he was up to as a play caller too.
Pretty soon after the season ended the Breakers did the beautiful thing of extending the contracts of Rob Loe and Finn Delany. Two more years for Delany and three more for Loe, joining Corey Webster and Tom Abercrombie as the only fellas contracted for next season (and beyond). No surprises, Matt Walsh made special note of the Breakers’ commitment to kiwi talent in the press release... something that he had to answer some tough questions about at the start of things after the way the last couple free agencies had gone and rightly so. But while it took longer than it should have to get here, the fact is that there are now four Tall Blacks regulars with deep connections to the club locked down for multiple seasons as the core of this team. Thus the Breakers, who also have Dan Shamir under contract for two more seasons, ought to have more of the continuity and stability moving forwards that they lacked this time.
So that’s all positive. Plenty of reason to think that with the right imports in place next time this team should be able to pick up where they left off this season and be a lot more like the 11-3 team that they were in the second half of things than the 4-10 team they were at the start. Although that doesn’t excuse the dramas of 4-10. Rarely has a kiwi sports team been as dishevelled as this team was during that stretch, just a lunar eclipse of weird things happening at once.
Yeah, the injuries were unfortunate. Regardless of everything else if Hopson, Loe, and Delany had been fit throughout then we’d be gearing up for a semi-final right now, no doubt about it. But injuries happen to everybody. The Tall Blacks being away through preseason at the World Cup didn’t help either as Dan Shamir barely got to work with his top roster until the term had already started. Again, awkward and difficult. But then nobody forced the Breakers to change their head coach and bring in a foreign dude with no NBL experience who obviously had to then start from scratch with his playbook (not to mention the ugly way with which they parted with Kevin Braswell, a dude who has been otherwise beloved wherever he’s gone).
And going to America for that NBA x NBL runaround as the rest of the league was beginning their season was kinda unnecessary. From a marketing perspective it was huge. A chance to show off RJ Hampton and continue to spread the gospel of the Aotearoa Breakers overseas after the headlines they’d gathered up thanks to the Next Star yarn. Tom Abercrombie had a badass dunk. Sweet as. But clearly all the travel affected them as they returned to the NBL to tip off a couple weeks late and thus began with four straight double headers. It’s something the Breakers have admitted they might try be a bit smarter about in the future, same with that whole thing about handing the keys to the offence to an 18 year old point guard coming out of high school in the USA. The Breakers’ second half rise coincided with RJ Hampton playing less and less through injury and when he finally left, a couple games early, nobody really cared. The Breakers were 5-10 when Hampton was in the lineup and 10-3 when he wasn’t. Not to say that RJH didn’t have his lovely moments but this all comes with the territory of having an imported prospect in such an important role. Without doubt the Breakers will go back to the Next Stars well if they can... but it’d be very surprising if they don’t target a player a little further down the roster next time (something the Illawarra Hawks have also admitted).
Of course it never got worse than the Glen Rice Jr dumbness. Exactly why the Breakers decided that this club, in all their frantic chaos at the time, was the right place for GRJ to turn his life around boggles the mind. It was beyond delusional and the results of that experiment were extremely predictable. Fans have every right to continue to hold that against team management but nobody should be more pissed off about that than the six guys who gave absolutely bloody everything for the team down the stretch to so nearly get them into the playoffs. It was the most desperate of a number of win-now moves from NZB which basically all failed to change the course of it all... ironically it was only after they started consolidating for next season that this season began to take shape. Again, less was more.
Which is also why it was so silly that they picked up Dan Shamir’s third year option when they did, with the team still at 4-10. That’s when you wanna extend your head coach’s deal? Really? I mean, they didn’t know what was to follow but there no pressure whatsoever to make that call so soon. Not only that but circumstances meant we’d hardly even had a look at Shamir with all of his top roster available yet. With a record as bad as it was at that time it came off as a pretty defensive move, doubling down on the gamble of appointing him in the first place. Now compare that to how well received that news would have been this week after everything that’s happened since and it’s one more example of the Breakers’ media team flexing a flair for timing on par with a broken clock. Like, for example, burying Scotty Hopson’s signing underneath the hiring of Dan Shamir – whom we already knew had been in the country for more than a month at that time. It really does feel like Hopson never got the credit he deserved for his stint here (hopefully he comes back and has another crack). The Breakers have had to deal with plenty of bad publicity over the last twelve months and when we look at the timing of some of their media yarns it’s hard not to feel like they’ve been a little too aware of it all.
Still, while we’re talking about all that we can’t deny the incredible success they’ve had with fan engagement this term. The #UNBREAKABLE tag and their general social media game, with the Bantz and the LOLs, is pretty kitcshy even at the best of times but it’s doing something. Last time they were criticised for shaking up the matchday experience, trying to make it more like an NBA atmosphere within a population that doesn’t really vibe with that sort of thing. Kiwis (and especially Aucklanders) generally like to turn up five minutes before kickoff/tipoff and moan about the price of a watered-down beer and then maybe if they’re feeling rowdy then they might clap extra loudly or join in on a monotonous chant or two. Breakers games were a rare exception to this so to meddle with the formula upset a few people.
But you know what? Instead of backing down from the NBA-style atmosphere, what they did instead was bring the rest of the club’s marketing efforts in line with that and are now offering something to punters which is pretty unique in this country. Crowds were up across the whole league but none moreso than at the Breakers, who began with record crowds and then the bubble never burst. That includes numerous excellent community engagement initiatives too. Of everything that happened this wild and chaotic season... this was their biggest success:
Look, we’ll be here all day if we get into all the fine details. Part of that defiant social media approach is that there are a lot of equally defiant Breakers fans who, in a very Barstoolly way, are not gonna listen to any criticism of the club whatsoever and will blindly point at the way the team finished as justification of everything else. So it goes. There are also people who’ll have walked out on the club during the Glen Rice Jr saga, especially in light of so many familiar faces of the previous era having severed ties with the Breakers in recent times – viewing all that as a betrayal of team culture and heritage. It’s certainly not a coincidence that so many of them all left in such a short space of time. This is a different Breakers now, for better and for worse in various areas.
That stark contrast is why it’s so hard to get a line on this season. The wonderful second half was one thing but the season lasts 28 games and being great for half a season doesn’t make you a great team. If only there had been more trust in the kiwi dudes at the start of things and if the coach had been allowed a stable roster rather than the chopping and changing he got instead and all the complications of that then there’d be a different tone to this piece, most likely.
And that’s where I think I’ve landed on all this. It’s just a missed opportunity. Before the season I wrote that they had a top four roster but the question would be whether they can gel things together despite all the wonky variables. They did... but they didn’t do it soon enough, and that’s a bittersweet feeling. Bad luck played a large part in that but self-inflicted hurdles didn’t help. The NBL is too strong to feel like you can continue to win through as much instability as the Breakers had in those first few months of this campaign.
You know what though? Nobody can change all that now. The Breakers made some mistakes which ultimately cost them later on when things began to shine... they’ve had to live with the results of that (whether they accept a level of culpability or not). What they can do is learn the lessons of this season and channel that into getting back towards playing for championships again next time. We’ve seen the glimpses. Now we just gotta see it over a full season. Keep the meddling to a minimum and trust the core players on the roster. We’ll see how it goes.
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