Will This Be The Season That The Breakers Actually Live Up To The Hype?

The hype is there, the hype is always there. If there’s one thing these Breakers know how to do it’s to present an exciting, energetic, ambitious front. The hype ain’t imaged either. A couple of very impressive import signings mixed with a pair of NBA-aspiring French prospects and a sturdy local core has gotten folks salivating about what this Breakers team might achieve when the season eventually, belatedly gets underway in November. The only thing is... people felt that way last season too. And the season before. And those ones didn’t turn out so well.

Matt Walsh and associates bought the Breakers organisation late in the 2017-18 season and were in place as Paul Henare coached the lads into the playoffs (where they were comfortably beaten 2-0 by Melbourne United). That remains the last time the club made the semis. Paul Henare promptly left, replaced by Kevin Braswell. Braswell tried to shake up the roster and get them playing faster and more fluid but it didn’t work and they ended with a 12-16 record and soon Braswell was gone in murky circumstances.

In came Dan Shamir but the first half of the 2019-20 season was a disaster of epic proportions. Heaps of staff departed – including GM Dillon Boucher – and mix that with a flurry of injuries and some genuinely weird decision making (remember Glenn Rice Jr?) and although they actually brought it home with some fantastic play, led by a fit-again Scotty Hopson, it was too late to salvage things. They missed out on the semis by a single win.

Then last season they chose not to wait to try re-sign Scotty Hopson and instead ended up with a star import who arrived out of shape and was cut early in the season. Combine that with having to play most of the season based in various parts of Australia they slumped to a 12-24 record. The worst season win percentage since 2005–06, the club’s third year of existence. A few months later they gave Dan Shamir and assistant Mody Maor contract extensions.

By all accounts Dan Shamir is a really clever coach and he’s had some excellent players to work with. The balance of his teams hasn’t always been ideal - a scenario that remains thanks to the Breakers’ Talent > Fit tendencies (though less so since the Webster Bros departed) - but they’ve always attracted quality imports. There are Tall Blacks sprinkled all the way through that roster. On paper they’ve looked capable of competing for championships in each of the last three seasons... and yet they didn’t make the playoffs in any of them. Something ain’t right there.

If you want excuses then there are a myriad of them to choose from. They seem to be plagued by injuries every season. Constantly having to change the rotations isn’t great, nor is having to chop and change the roster itself. There have been trips to play against NBA teams and there has been Tall Blacks World Cup stuff that has affected preseasons. There has been staff turnover. There has been coaching turnover. There has been off-court player issues, both legal and career-wise. If you wanna get dumb about things you can blame officiating for some results. There have been regrettable decisions made by the club and there have been things entirely outside of their control. Most of all... there’s been the pandemic.

The Breakers haven’t shied away from emphasising that point: the Sky Sports insider doco of last season is called ‘154 days’ in reference to how long they were stuck in Aussie. As far as excuses go, that’s as legit as they come. No other team had to deal with that level of uneven playing field last term, even now things haven’t cleared for them. The Breakers just missed out on weeks of training time because of the Auckland lockdown and will have to play their first 12 games of the new season on the road. If they can come through that in okay shape then they will have 14 of 16 at home the rest of the way but everything’s covid-dependent at this point.

There’s definitely a case to say that each of the last three seasons should be disregarded because of all the dramas, especially the covid ones. That we can’t really judge the coach or the team by any of that because the scenarios were so extreme. Yet Dan Shamir has been extended twice already since he arrived. Once was the team option on his third season (taken up midway through year one) and the other a two-year extension signed back in July. There hasn’t been a whole lot of evidence that Shamir knows how to get the best out of an NBL roster. That’s not to say that he can’t... just that there’s not a lot of evidence. Extreme scenarios and all that. But the Breakers have committed hard to him all the same so that’s where we are.

The optimism around Coach Shamir stems from that one period where the Breakers were healthy, when Scotty Hopson was really balling out, after Glenn Rice Jr had been kicked to the curb, down the stretch in the 2019-20 season. They won nine of their last 12 games there and looked pretty bloody sharp. Was that an anomaly? Is that something they can recapture with their current roster? See that’s what we’re trying to bloody find out.

The late-season resurgence didn’t happen last season... but in fairness by the time they got back to Aotearoa they were exhausted. They fellas were already out of the mix and just playing things out to a conclusion. The fact that they’ve gotta start out in Australia again this term suggests that another unfortunate handicap is on the way, however that backload of home games in the second half of things could be the secret. Win enough games of those first twelve, which allows them room for the slow starts that we continually see from this team (they’ve begun 4-10 and 4-11 the past two campaigns), and then get it popping once they get back home. There’s potential for some snowballing momentum there. If, if, if they can do enough on their initial road trip.

For that to happen there are a couple things that need to break right and first and foremost this is a team that constantly seems to be rattled by injuries and so breath must be held on that account. There’s nothing you can do about a guy landing badly and rolling an ankle but there is also a case out there that Dan Shamir rides his key players a bit too hard. Last season the Breakers had four players in the top 18 for minutes per game.

Part of that is Shamir being a wee bit uncompromising... part of that is also a result of bad roster work. Lamar Patterson was a shocker and that had ramifications as the team tried to find others to pick up the slack they were expecting him to carry. The rosters were all short one import last season for covid/financial reasons. Dan Trist was a meaningless signing from day one and he hardly featured. Shamir hardly used his development players at all. Rob Loe missed some time for personal reasons. At that stage you’re bare bones even before you start tallying up injuries. Funny how quickly a sexy and exciting roster can fall to pieces when the main import doesn’t deliver.

Meaning that the best thing that the team can do on that front is to have a deeper roster. They’ve already dealt with the loss of the Webster Bros. Corey was squeezed out because of a limited role while Tai didn’t wanna get his vaccination (if they hadn’t already released Corey then he’d have been out for the same reason). That sounds stink... but a roster with Peyton Siva, William McDowell-White, Hugo Besson, and Jeremiah Martin has enough ball-handlers as it is so that’s all good. They’ve sorta ended up with better balanced squad now in a funky way (though whether you’d rather have WMW over TW talent-wise is another matter entirely).

But it wasn’t ball-handlers where they were coming up short, it was role players. Hence if things are going to be different this time around then it’s on the two young French lads to deliver. Ousmane Dieng is a Next Star while Hugo Besson would have been a Next Star but they got Dieng instead but liked Besson so much that they signed him as an import instead. That’s risky. Flash back to the RJ Hampton Experience and it was clear then that a franchise dreaming of a championship and a teenager from overseas dreaming of getting drafted to the NBA were not quite compatible. You just can’t be giving big minutes to guys straight out of high school, no matter how much raw talent they have, and expecting that to lead to immediate success. Walshy loves his Next Stars though so the compromise is that they’ve made sure the next Next Star isn’t a point guard so that his individual play won’t be as impactful on the wider team results. Dan Shamir, who is always a refreshing voice of honesty within the Breakers, was asked about that balance by Liam Santamaria the other day...

Coach Shamir: “You know me, I don’t like empty words so I don’t know. Nobody knows. It {remains} to be seen. You don’t see a lot of that in international basketball but in the NBA you do. Teams that are rebuilding are usually not the teams that are winning championships and the conflict between win now or develop now is a conflict. We believe that its possible that you’re gonna pay some price from the learning curve. Obviously we want these players for a lot of reasons. It’s good for the league, it’s good for the team. There are a lot of business ideas into it. But we also want another player.”

He basically admits that this is something which may have an impact on their immediate success. He also admits that one of his favourite benefits of a Next Star is that they’re a bonus player who don’t count against the roster – one extra body – but then that’s kinda offset by using their third international spot on Besson as an ersatz second Next Star. They may not have used that third spot anyway but still.

The Breakers can roll out a pretty tidy starting line-up. Peyton Siva, William McDowell-White, Jeremiah Martin, Finn Delany, Yanni Wetzell. That’d go down well for sure. They have flexibility down low thanks to Wetzell’s skill and Rob Loe’s shooting. Tom Abercrombie is a coach’s blueprint of a glue guy. But for this team to go beyond the 28 games and into the semis (it’s a shorter season this time due to the late start, which feels beneficial to the Breakers) then their two French prospects are going to have to deliver at a level above what RJ Hampton gave this team.

Without a doubt, the Breakers had more of a struggle with their home-away-from-home status than the Warriors or Phoenix did last season... though the difference there is that the Warriors and Phoenix had both had earlier attempts at being based in Oz. The Breakers did not and not only that but there were added hassles of being forced to pack up camp and relocate several times even within Australia. Matt Walsh reckons they moved nine different times that season. No solid base, no stability. There’s every reason to think they should be better equipped this time around. We shall, as they say, see.

It’s honestly the strangest thing that the Breakers have operated the way that they have for as long as they have without barely copping it at all from the wider kiwi sports media. The Glenn Rice stuff crossed over but that was about it. This was a perennial contending franchise not that long ago and they haven’t even made the playoffs for the last three seasons, despite having rosters that the experts drooled all over. It could be that the (completely valid) covid sympathies the team has garnered have papered over the cracks in how they’ve operated on the whole. It could be that basketball just doesn’t get enough respect (shout out Rodney Dangerfield). Other NZ sports teams have been savaged for far less, just saying.

(And that’s without even getting into the utter weirdness of their twitter account evolving into an irrepressible meme factory or the ongoing links with the obnoxious contemptables of Barstool Sports. But those are matters for another day).

This isn’t meant to be a takedown or anything. Merely pointing out that there’s been this chasm between expectations and reality for the Breakers. Frankly, after three years of that we should be firmly in ‘believe it when we see it’ mode when it comes to any winning expectations. Any hype that says otherwise is only that: hype.

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