Tagged with: NZ Breakers
It hasn’t always been this way. This overflow of kiwi ballers in the Aussie league, it used to be a couple of top tier Tall Blacks plying their trade across the Tasman and then a large contingent of Breakers dudes.
Well that was bloody awful, wasn’t it? Some nice moments along the home stretch perhaps, that was cool, but the New Zealand Breakers entered this season expecting to be able to challenge for a championship. That was the target.
At this stage last season the Breakers were 3-9, soon to be 4-10, just getting themselves out from the self-inflicted wound that was Glen Rice Jr and with RJ Hampton nearing his fifteenth and final appearance for the club.
The NBL Cup begins in a few days, with all the teams amassing in Melbourne for a mini-tournament within a tournament. Everybody plays each other once with those games counting also towards the proper season, as well as to a points table specifically for the hub games
It’s taken a lot of waiting for this NBL season to finally swing around and even as it does the Breakers still have to wait a little longer as they didn’t have a scheduled game in round one. All part of the juggling of various state protocols, trying to do this thing in the midst of a global pandemic, you know?
Doings remain afoot at Breakers HQ, as two-time All-NBL First Team wingman Lamar Patterson has signed a one-year deal with the club to fill the first of their two import slots.
It’s been a long time since there was any legit Breakers news, a loooong time. But this week has brought with it some actual chunky news to digest because NBL Free Agency has officially begun and our mates at the Breaks wasted no time in getting down and dirty.
The last Breakers season was weird. For half a season they felt like a complete shambles and then for half a season they were sneakily excellent.
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. The Breakers lingered at 4-10 with little sign that it was gonna get any better. But it did. Substantially.
The RJ Hampton experience is no longer. With only a couple games remaining and the American prodigy still dealing with a lingering hip injury it’s been decided that the best course of action is for RJH to return to the USA to get himself healthy and prepare for the 2020 NBA Draft.
Of all the bonkers things that have gone on during one of the most insane single seasons ever witnessed from a professional kiwi sports club, a sudden 180 flip in form isn’t the most unexpected of those things but it’s up there.
With a 4-10 record at the half-way stage of their season, it’s pretty unlikely that the Breakers make the semis from here. They’re four back in the win-column from fourth place and second to last on the ladder.
All this weirdness I’ve been writing about, which has had the effect of eroding away the last vestiges of what this club used to stand for, has been in order to create an immediately successful basketball team. So, like, what happens now if this goes the wrong way and they tumble into irrelevance with half a season still to go?
If the Wellington Phoenix get to be a work in progress, accepting their two opening defeats with encouragement because of the unique rebuilding situation they find themselves in, then the NZ Breakers get to have the same treatment too because... I mean, just look at it all.
Remember like two weeks ago when Corey Webster wanted to take up that offer to play in Turkey and the Breakers didn’t wanna let him go because as a local player of the skill level that Webby is it was just impossible to replace him this close to the start of the season? Yeah well that problem doesn’t exist for import players.
Tell you one thing, there’s been no shortage of drama around the Breakers organisation in recent times. Good drama, bad drama, and ugly drama. A little bit of everything to keep everyone engaged.
If you take it in isolation then it was just a pensive moment. Dillon Boucher, a legend of both Breakers basketball and New Zealand basketball, a multiple championship winner whose jersey hangs in the rafters for this club, had resigned as general manager of the New Zealand Breakers.
And with a triple swoop on Wednesday the Breakers have now completed their roster for the upcoming season. ‘Director of Basketball’ Dan Shamir will have a dozen players to juggle and rotate, as well as Terry Li and with two more development players yet to be named.
The word was that there was going to be a new Breakers announcement on Wednesday, and a big one too. Then the word was that it was going to be a double announcement which makes it even bigger.
New Zealand’s only professional basketball team just signed a Chinese teenager to a development player contract. Terry Li comes from the NBA Global Academy which runs out of Basketball Australia’s Centre of Excellence. He’s a 198cm tall guard, meant to be extremely athletic, and he’s signed on a three year deal.