The Breakers are in a slump, they say. Lost eight of their last 12 since they went on that nine-game winning streak. Really does sound a lot like a slump, to be fair.

Although... what would you say to the assertion that the slump ended a few weeks ago, with the win over Sydney at Qudos Bank Arena? That was the game when Rob Loe scored 23 points, the last game before Christmas.

Starting with that game, their record has been 3-4. Still a losing record over the stretch but sometimes people underestimate how hard it is to win away in this league, particularly for the Breakers with the extra international travel, and all four of their subsequent losses have come away from home. Two of their three wins have been at home. Earlier in December they’d been thrashed in Auckland by both Perth and Adelaide but their last two home games have been a 13-point win over Cairns and a 17-point win over Melbourne in which Edgar Sosa only played half a game.

Circumstances have seen the Breakers slip to fourth on the ladder but they’re three wins better off than Illawarra with six games remaining for each and they play them in a double header, both away and then home, this weekend (Friday and Sunday nights) with the chance to book their spot in the semis with a sweep. Even a split would all but seal it for NZB. And with games in hand on all the teams above them, ending up a little higher than fourth is very much still on the cards.

Away in Perth most recently the Breakers were up 55-53 midway through the third quarter before collapsing over the fifteen minutes. Having only turned the ball over six times in the first 30 minutes, they coughed it up four times in the last ten as the Wildcats responded to that two-point deficit by outscoring them 35-20 the rest of the way. The Breaks ran out of steam. They shot 4/24 from deep in the game. They didn’t have an answer for Bryce Cotton. Once again they had the worst of the foul count. Lots of things went wrong but they were playing away in Perth, where lots of things go wrong for every visiting team.

Obviously the Breakers aren’t playing their best basketball, it’s just that despite the very surface-level assumptions that they’re still in the same hole they were a month ago, the team has actually been much better recently. They’re staying competitive (at least for three quarters) and if they can fix a couple main things then it’s pretty conceivable they can get back to where they started things.

The Immediate List Of Stuff To Fix:

1) Shea Ili needs to start having that same impact again. Coaches have sorta figured him out and he’s been unable to get to the rim so easily anymore. Hit a few jump shots though, get them respecting that option, and that will change.

2) Rakeem Christmas is still settling in and Paul Henare’s still working on how to split those big man minutes. Yet Xmas has been good, he’s a solid rebounder and he can score in the paint. Wouldn’t mind seeing more of him, tbh.

3) Free throws are pathetic. It’ll surprise exactly nobody that they have the worst FT% in the competition and it’s not really close. 67.5% through 22 games, while Brisbane are first with 80.4%. Melbourne are second-worst, they make 70.3% of them and are first so clearly this ain’t the be all and end all… but that’s a lot of points being left on the table. Worst candidates? Surprisingly DJ Newbill is only at 65.3% there while Rob Loe is at 50%. Then of course Mika Vukona is at a terrible 38.5%

4) Tom Abercrombie and Kirk Penney. They don’t need both jokers to go off at once necessarily but we can’t afford both to stink it up at once. There have been four occasions over the last 12 games (including both the last two) in which neither scored in double figures. These are the Breakers’ two best three-point shooters and they need to be scoring. No shocker that the two times they both scored in double digits across that time were the two recent handy home wins. Across those dozen games, Abercrombie is shooting 40% from the field for 9.9 PPG while Penney is shooting 35.2% for 8.1 PPG. They combined for 9 total points in Perth.

5) Boring stuff like fouling and rebounding that always reflect better for winning teams.

Most of all though, they need to get Edgar Sosa going. When he went down injured against Melbourne United, the Breakers were barely thirty seconds into the third quarter of the game, having dropped 60 points in the first half. Sosa had 15 of them and the team was on pace for their best offensive performance of the season. Without him they scored 38 points in the second half. Enough to hold on for victory, some quality defence and uncharacteristically good free throw shooting allowing them to recover from what with less than two minutes left was only a four-point lead to win 98-81.

You don’t even need to dig deeper to see the impact of Sosa’s injury. When he was unable to go against the Cairns Taipans over the ditch in the next one, the Breakers could only score 71 points. It wasn’t terrible. Shea Ili has proved he can be a tertiary scorer and he was able to drop 14 points, although he missed all four shots from deep, while DJ Newbill stepped up big time with a season-high 25 points. But NZB got just 16 combined points off the bench and when they really needed to create some offence, with the game on the line in the fourth quarter, they froze up. The Taipans went on an 18-0 run to take it from a 64-57 4Q lead to a 75-65 deficit and the Breaks went on to lose by ten.

Sosa makes the difference there. He’s the one player in this team who can both create his own shot and create shots for other players while guarded by the best defenders on the other side. You could tell he wasn’t yet a hundy percent as he shot 4/11 for 10 points in his return in Perth because before that he was scoring for fun – a five game streak averaging 19.8 PPG at 46.6 FG% and 47.5 3PT%, and that was really only four and a half games too.

The Breakers have only played the Hawks once this season. They lost 90-79 in Wollongong – although Sosa scored 20 points with four triples in that game. It was Rakeem Christmas’ first game and he had 14p & 8r. However they also had a season-high 19 turnovers, Alex Pledger the only man to take the court who didn’t have one and he only played two minutes. Given that Nick Kay dropped 20 on 7/11 shooting, you’d imagine we get a lot more Pledgehammer in this one and if the Breakers can maintain the big rebounding advantage they had there while keeping better care of the ball then there’s no reason they can’t win both games. Make some free throws, get Abercrombie (who was 0/5 from deep) and Penney involved… bingo. That’ll do it.

They may not be lighting it up like they were at the start of the season but they’ve still got those early wins in the books and it’s kept them in the playoffs throughout their downers. Maybe this is being optimistic but it really seems like they’ve turned the corner, they just aren’t getting the wins to show for it. Close losses and some avoidable mistakes, combined with missing their best offensive player for six quarters, as opposed to some of the genuinely bad basketball of early December.

But we’ll find out if that theory’s true this weekend.

Season MVP Standings

Edgar Sosa – 31 pts

DJ Newbill – 23 pts

Tom Abercrombie – 20 pts

MVP Points vs Perth (L 90-73)

3 – Rakeem Christmas

2 – Mika Vukona

1 – Alex Pledger

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