First of all, I’d like to welcome all these other media folk to the gathering. A couple pretty solid articles from around the kiwi landscape just recently have finally bothered to take a little peek at the state of things at the Breakers. The Niche Cache (and a couple hearty allies) have been keeping the campfire burning out here in our wilderness for a while now out but apparently making a coach redundant to get rid of him easier, hiring a Director of Basketball instead of a head coach to back up that redundancy idea, a general manager quitting a month out from the season, a star player begging for release but being denied (and getting told how rubbish he was last season in negotiations), an assistant coach quitting at the airport on the way back from a preseason tour, a retired number inexcusably being worn by a new import, and whatever else I’ve missed weren’t enough to alert the folks with the big(ger) budgets to join us in digging deeper into how weird things have been lately in and around the Breakers. But signing a fresh import with a violent past seemed to do the trick.

I’m not gonna make any assumptions about Glen Rice Jr as a person, whatever problems he’s had in the past I have no reason to think he hasn’t overcome them. You can’t expect people to learn and evolve if you never give them the opportunity. He’s just out there trying to maintain a career playing basketball and if things do turn nuclear all of a sudden... well, the Breakers knew the risk they were taking will have to cop the majority of the blame in that (hypothetical) scenario. Dan Shamir was Rice’s coach when the fella decked a teammate in the locker room and was booted from Hapoel Holon. They knew all about his dodgy past. And they brought him in anyway.

So why risk such drama? Because they’re bloody losing, man. And this is how desperate they are to turn things around – getting in on the best possible player they could find regardless of the red flags. It’s a signal of intent and based on his first couple performances for the club you can see exactly why Coach Shamir is so keen to work with him again. 45 combined points in his first two games goes pretty good... so good that it also creates a weird situation where once Scott Hopson is back then do the Breakers cut Sek Henry in order to keep Glen Rice Jr around? Rice is only here as a short term injury replacement. Which would be preeeetty awkward for Sek Henry who hasn’t done a lot wrong, he’s got to do something about his shooting percentages but he’s also one of the few guys you’d trust on the defensive end here.

It’s going to happen though. Bold and decisive action has been a tendency of this Breakers ownership. Bringing in Kevin Braswell to oversee a drastic shift in playing style amidst a drastic shift in the roster but then sacking him (sorry, redundifying him) after only one year is evidence of that. But this season it’s really gotten drastic and that’s because the whole RJ Hampton situation has amplified everything. The Breakers really need to get it right to justify this ambitious direction... which means two things: getting Hampton drafted in the first round (ideally in the lottery) and winning a lot of basketball games.

(Those two things aren’t mutually dependant - LaMelo Ball is gonna be drafted pretty high despite playing for a largely mud Illawarra team).

Basketball first and I still maintain that this is a Breakers roster capable of making the semis. It’s just that star players don’t equal a star team and the more you watch these fellas the more it’s clear that there’s just too much craziness going on. Dan Shamir is always talked about as a thinker and a scholar and those types of coaches tend to have their own ways of doing things which players have to adjust to. Systems and philosophies (remember how Corey Webster called him the Jewish Jose Mourinho?).

That takes time to develop. Time which is complicated by the mix and match nature of this roster. You’ve got an 18 year old starting point guard. You’ve got a bunch of kiwi internationals (who by the way missed a lot of preseason at the World Cup). You’ve got a handful of American imports. You’ve got a Sudanese-Australian-Lebanese big fella who really oughta be getting more minutes. There’s an Aussie point guard. We’ve had one import swapped out for another on the brink of the season and we’ve got another import brought in to temporarily replace an injured one.

Plus they started the season two weeks late because of the NBLxNBA thing and have been playing double gameweeks up until now which severely limits the time they can spend on the training court actually learning how to make this thing work. And it definitely doesn’t help that Finn Delany has missed the first eight games of the season and Analytics Darling Rob Loe is out for the foreseeable future with a busted face. Jarrad Weeks missed the last game too, not to mention Scotty Hopson’s indefinite absence – an injury which wasn’t as bad as it could have been, thankfully, but bringing in a replacement for him doesn’t quite suggest a two to three week recovery.

How is any coach, let alone one who is used to a different culture of basketball and has never coached in this league before (neither have either of his assistants), supposed to turn this into a winning team straight off the bat like that? It’s way too much to expect. An unfamiliar roster, a new coach, an experimental point guard, crippling injuries... these are not the usual ingredients in the recipe of success.

And they’re not, because the Breakers are currently 2-6 and their next game is away to the Perth Wildcats. Lose that one and they’ll be five games under evens already – remember Kevin Braswell got the boot for finishing 12-16. The schedule does get a little easier after Perth with their next five games against teams currently with even or losing records but then that doesn’t really guarantee anything either. The Breakers have a points differential of -68 in second halves so far and have been outscored by double digits in the third quarter of their last three, just getting slayed by those halftime adjustments.

Dan Shamir has actually been pretty impressive with how he’s conducted himself through all this. He’s not offering excuses even though they’re there for all to see. And while it would have been preferable for another kiwi assistant coach brought in to replace Mike Fitchett, the hiring of Mody Maor is clearly better for the club right now, giving Coach Shamir someone he’s familiar with while Maor has also had a positive mentoring effect on RJ Hampton. But they’re still losing games. And this, ladies and gents, is where we get to the fork in the road.

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 (although not on purpose, I don’t believe - that old way of doing things was always going to struggle in a more commercialised NBL these days), has been in order to create an immediately successful basketball team. You don’t sign Glen Rice Jr as an injury replacement if you’re ready to accept a transitional year. So, like, what happens now if this goes the wrong way and they tumble into irrelevance with half a season still to go? Will these fantastic early season crowds keep turning up? Will RJ Hampton last the term or will he leave early to do the workout circuit ahead of the draft? Will there be revolving door action for more coaches and players?

It’s all good building a culture of hype but if you can’t live up to it then suddenly you’ve got nothing to fall back on. This team has been exposed to that worst case scenario ever since Dillon Boucher left, taking with him the remaining goodwill of the previous era. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it means that the current Breakers will either sink or swim based on their own merits alone. This was only a hypothetical idea when Boucher jumped ship. It’s now at the point where perhaps the cracks are starting to show...

Wow, bad news for snapback manufacturers everywhere (hey, he wears them well, fair play).

That altercation was a heated yarn with the NBL Commissioner after RJ Hampton had been tossed early from the game against South East Melbourne. Hampton was upset at a bump he’d be dealt at the other end so he dropped a heavy screen on Ben Madgen, which was correctly called for a foul. Then he got an unsportsmanlike added for some afters when he stepped over the fella, leading to some kerfuffling in which he tried to grab John Roberson in a headlock. The unsportsmanlike call was a bit over the top but mostly this was a young fella unable to keep his cool and putting himself in this situation barely four minutes into a game where the Breakers were already without their backup PG Jarrad Weeks due to injury. Whatever personal revenge he got from showing he won’t back down is offset by the damage he did to his team. If he didn’t get a bollicking from Maor after that then I’d be stunned.

These are the risks you take with giving a rookie this kind of prominence in your team, no matter how talented they might be. Actually, there’s a very solid argument that he should be getting more prominence because his defensive shortcomings aren’t as bad as the some of the directionless offence this team is capable of without a specialist point guard on the floor but whatever, that’s a different article altogether.

Problem is that this little flare up came soon after an article published on The Athletic (you’ll probably need to use their app to read it) which really didn’t paint the whole experience for RJH in the best light, gotta say. I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for all that because most of it sounded like normal teenage problems. His mates are all going to college... while he’s living in a foreign country with his parents and younger brother. He’s not comfortable enough to drive on the other side of the road so his dad is dropping him off at trainings. His mum keeps trying to get him to go up the Skytower or wander up One Tree Hill or whatever but he just wants to stay home outside of basketball hours. Of course that’s gonna be tough for him and especially at his age. It also won’t have hardly any effect on whether other Next Stars follow in his footsteps because all they’ll look at is where he gets drafted, end of story.

This quote was rather dark though...

“It’s definitely hard. I have good days and I have bad days. I wish I could wake up and know what I did these last 28 games and I’d be home. If someone gave me a wish and said, ‘R.J., you gotta live with whatever outcome, but you could go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and those 28 games are played.’ I’m taking that risk. I’m taking that risk.”

Youngblood’s gotta start journaling or something, damn. Seems like he’s got some thoughts he’s gotta get out there onto the page. But, you know, he’ll also feel more at home if he gets out there and absorbs his environment rather than living like he’s in an airport terminal waiting for a plane. Just saying.

Hilariously The Niche Cache was unexpectedly quoted in that article. Not so hilariously they didn’t bother to chuck a link in to the piece they were quoting or even attribute the website they got it from... plus at one point Paul Henare was referred to as the coach of the All Blacks. It was pretty clearly written from an American perspective with only the typical surface level interest in what’s going on in Aotearoa so take it all with a grain of salt. Although that USA perspective did serve up this one other cheeky scoop...

Now, I noticed that the Breakers didn’t actually refer to Rick Pitino in their announcing of Dan Shamir. That was something that other folks around the traps picked up on from his wikipedia page. But there doesn’t ever seem to have been anyone barking around trying to correct that mishap like tends to happen with some of the less glowing reports out there (IYKYK). Which, honestly, is getting so tiresome.

Take Tom Abercrombie’s contract extension for example. Great news, right? The team’s most experienced player and a Tall Blacks icon committing himself to the club moving forwards, showing his support for the direction that everything is heading in, right? Sure. And it’s beautiful that Tom Abercrombie is hanging around. But the thing there is that he signed a three-year contract before the 2018-19 season. He still had two years to run on that thing so they’ve actually only given him one extra season, at a time when there was no rush to do so, and in exchange they were able to feed him a script that read like an ISIS hostage video...

“It is important for me as a player who’s been here a long time to show that I’m 100 percent behind the changes at the club. I am 100 percent committed to what Dan Shamir and the team are doing and the direction the club is going.”

This is the same guy who strangely found himself with a teammate’s arm around his neck as he tried to drag RJ Hampton out of that kerfuffle last game. Not sure why Glen Rice decided he needed to drag Abercrombie off Hampton but poor old Tommy, the nicest fella in the league, and he keeps getting caught in the middle of things. By the way if you’re wondering how permanent an NBL contract extension can be, he signed his last one at the same time as Shea Ili.

Look, none of this is meant to be anti-Breakers or whatever. I want to see them winning games and doing well, regardless of anything else. And that might still happen as things come together over the coming weeks now that their schedule has slowed down, the wagon traversing merrily along the sunny, green, heavenly path at this fork in the road. Or it could go the other way.

Fingers crossed it’s the first path.

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