Sifting Through The Breakers’ Bad Weekend For Clues
There’s nothing fluke-ish about a nine-game winning streak. The Breakers may have been underestimated at the start of the campaign and they may even have dropped a silly one to Cairns in their season opener but it takes a certain type of team to be able to rip off nine in a row after that. If there were doubts about the championship pedigree of this 2017-18 New Zealand Breakers unit then there are no longer.
However streaks are designed to end, their very existence is framed by beginning and ends. So don’t shed too many tears over a tricky weekend that saw NZB drop consecutive games against Perth (home) and Brisbane (away). They were going to lose eventually. In fact if their luck had been cast in a different colour then they might never have had such a run at all. The first win of those nine came at home to Sydney thanks to a last-second lay-up from DJ Newbill to decide the contest. Edgar Sosa hit a three pointer at the buzzer to defeat the Taipans in Cairns a few weeks ago. So it goes.
With the necessary context in the bag now it’s time to dig a little deeper and see what went wrong in these two defeats and how easy that stuff will be to amend. Starting with the obvious fact which is that a large portion of this team, including the coach, were returning from the FIBA qualifiers in Hong Kong, only to have to play a double-header which took them from Auckland to Brisbane. Clearly that’s not gonna leave you in the ideal condition.
Yeah, clearly, though it wasn’t only the Tall Blacks that struggled. The two imports were off their best, Kirk Penney went scoreless on six shots in Brissie – the first duck of his NBL career, this a former scoring champ. Yet when the Breakers are outscored by 17 points in the second half of a home game and fail to hold a single second half lead in either contest… fatigue is probably a factor.
Another thing worth mentioning is that across those nine wins, the Breakers only twice won by double figures and six of those wins were by six points or less, effectively (but simplistically) a miss and a make at each end the difference. They were a 9-1 team with a point differential of only +50. That’s now 9-3 and +29 by the way. Even before these last two games they were only scoring a dead-average 86.7 points per game and after two totals in the 70s since that’s dropped down to the second-worst in the NBL, ahead only of the Cairns Taipans.
Now, that suggests a couple things. One is that if this team was winning games without scoring all that rapidly or being able to put teams away then they must be playing some lights-out defence and you already know that’s the case. The other thing is that when the margins are as slim as that, it doesn’t take much to turn Ws into Ls. Drop a little on the effort-meter and that’ll do it. Clang a few too many shots and that’ll do it.
They definitely missed shots in these two games. Shot 38% against Perth and 41% against Brisbane. Nothing terrible by any means but nothing especially good either. More notable is that they were 7/29 from deep in the Perth game and 7/20 in the Brissie one. This is a team that’s done great from outside this season, both offensively and defensively. The latter was okay, other than Jesse Wagstaff’s four triple barrage on Friday night and Reuben Te Rangi hitting 3/6 from deep in Brisbane. There’s something about that dude, aye? While the Breaker Boys struggled coming back from international duty he seemed to thrive on it, having outplayed most of the NZB Tall Blacks there anyway.
The 14/49 three point shooting though, that’s an issue. For Tom Abercrombie to shoot 3/9 from deep in these two games was not the best. For Sosa and Newbill to be a combined 2/12 from deep against Perth, also not the best. And Kirk Penney’s 2/11 over the two games? No need to spell that one out for ya. These are all good shooters going cold at once.
There were a couple factors here that you could glean before anything had even started which would decide the Breakers’ fate. One was that the imports needed to be stars, they had to be game-winners and leaders. Check, check and check on all fronts. Then there was the bench. Kirk Penney was going to need to bring plenty of points as the sixth man and Shea Ili was gonna need to fill in with those guard minutes. Get some improved numbers from Rob Loe and that’s a fantastic second unit. Don’t get those three things and it might just be awful. Well, Ili has surpassed expectations and then some. The jury is still out on Loe. But Captain Kirk? It just hasn’t happened for him regularly enough yet.
Obvious sympathies to him because he’s had to deal with things this season that far outweigh basketball. Plus he’s 37 years old so he’s at the point where his stats are gonna drop off from year to year anyway. However last season Penney averaged 17.2 points shooting 41% from 3pt. This season in nine games player he’s only scored more than 17 points once and he’s five times been kept to single digits.
There’s not a lot that the Breakers need from him other than to be a ruthless spot shooter and get to areas where the guards can put the ball in his hands. Watching him play, that’s exactly what he seems to be doing – having still made 22/47 threes at 46.8% (he was an insane 20/36 before this weekend!). The Kirk numbers are skewed because of his mixed playing time. This weekend was ugly but before the break he was entering into some real form, scoring 16 (6/8 FG), 14 (5/11 FG) and 17 (6/10 FG) in his previous three games. Maybe best to chill on Penney’s struggles then.
Same goes for the imports. We already knew that Sosa is capable of ups and downs with his shooting and Newbill has still scored at least 10 points in every game this season. At the back end of that Bullets game, with the team playing awful, it was those two who conspired to hit some shots and get the Breaks back into it. Meanwhile Shea Ili’s just doing the same stuff he’s been doing all season. Getting dominated on the boards by Perth? Rebounding is effort-play stuff. You can assume that they’re getting dressed down at training by Coach Henare as you read these very words so don’t worry about that. This is a great rebounding team, just as it’s a great defensive team. It will continue to be both.
More concerning was the inexplicable stat that the Bullets attempted 36 free throws in that game while the Breakers only got to the line 13 times. All the fouls probably come under the banner of tired defence as well but… damn. That just shouldn’t happen, not under any circumstances.
Still, it seems like an outlier and when the Breakers host the Bullets in the fourth and final of their four-game season series on Thursday the thing, as all coaches always stress, that’ll best indicate whether they’re up for starting a new win streak or not isn’t whether Kirk Penney’s first shot goes in or if there’s a change in the starting line-up or whether Tom Abercrombie asserts himself offensively but how locked in they are when they’re on defence. We’ve seen them do it plenty of times already so we know this team is capable. It really is that simple.
All the stats in the world and that’s still the answer, shout out to sports.
MVP Points at Brisbane (L 81-76)
DJ Newbill – 3
Edgar Sosa – 2
Rob Loe - 1
MVP Points vs Perth (L 89-73)
Alex Pledger – 3
Shea Ili – 2
Finn Delany - 1
Overall 2017-18 Standings:
DJ Newbill – 17
Edgar Sosa – 17
Shea Ili – 9
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