Tagged with: NBL
Let us talk about the New Zealand Breakers, who recently wrapped up their latest NBL campaign. It was a season that began with scepticism based on a roster full of project players and the rookie foreign head coach hired to whip them into shape.
There were plenty of reasons to discount the New Zealand Breakers heading into NBL25. Yet they were 2-0 when they flew to the USA and then they returned and they kept winning.
Last season the Breakers gave fewer minutes to NZers than ever before (a record that they’re going to crush again in NBL25) and yet it was still the most prosperous season we’ve ever witnessed for kiwi players in that league.
These are glorious times for basketball in Aotearoa. Already established as the fastest growing sport in the country, we recently saw the New Zealand team finish fourth at the FIBA Men’s U17 World Championships, with Oscar Goodman crowned as part of the tournament’s All Star Five…
As we traversed what was already shaping up to be a concerning offseason, the feeling was that the Breakers would be alright as long as Head Coach Mody Maor was around. But now he’s leaving.
Gotta love a bit of Aotearoa’s National Basketball League. It’s a rapidly growing competition that regularly attracts most of the country’s best players whilst also attracting a decent level of import and still finding room to boost up the next generation
In a topsy-turvy, up-and-down season... the Breakers finished about where they should have: right in the middle. They made the play-ins but not the playoffs, winning one knockout game but losing the other
There is a possibility, something we need to at least consider, that perhaps maybe potentially we might have given the New Zealand Breakers too much credit. When they turned everything around so suddenly last season it was natural to feel as though…
After several years of mediocrity, some pandemic-influenced and some not, the Breakers surged back into Australian National Basketball League prominence last season under the inspirational guidance of new head coach Mody Maor
New Zealanders are steadily infiltrating the Australian NBL and folks are slowly starting to notice… although those on this side of the Tasman Sea understand that this is not a new trend
The whole Next Star journey has been a strange one for the Breakers but as their latest foreign prospect officially declares for the NBA Draft it seems as though they’ve finally figured it out
Breakers recruitment this season was top notch and for once they’ve actually got the structure, the success, and the coach to be able to do something they have not yet done since the change in ownership: retain an import signing.
It’s not supposed to happen that a team finishes dead last one season then surges into triumphant championship contention the next. Standard convention says that it takes time to traverse that distance
Credit where credit is due because the Breakers have done a lot of nice things in the weeks since Mody Maor took over as head coach. Logical, respectable roster building things
Once released by the Breakers after they chose to prioritise RJ Hampton as a Next Star instead, now one of the most important players for a Melbourne United team that won the championship last season and had the best regular season record of any team this time around
The Breakers were supposed to be playing the Cairns Taipans on New Year’s Eve but covid protocols saw an end to that possibility. One of a number of games that have been postponed in the NBL lately... giving the Breaks a sneaky two weeks off after losing to the Tasmania Jack Jumpers on Boxing Day
It was back on July 9 that it was first reported that the Breakers had picked up Peyton Siva and Hugo Besson on import contracts for the upcoming NBL season. The pair travelled to Aotearoa some time in the subsequent weeks but it was only on August 22 that Siva was finally announced.
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.