How Did The Breakers Fall So Far Short Of Expectations In NBL21?
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. Instead they went 12-24 and finished second to last. They started 1-6 and at no stage came even close to the top four after that. They never even again got within three games of a .500 record the rest of the way. We’re talking here about the lowest scoring team in the entire competition in terms of total points despite what the experts assured us was one of the finest rosters out.
There was lots that went on during this long and gruelling season for the Breakers but there’s only one question that really needs answering right now: How did they fall so far short of expectations?
Away Daze
A simple one to begin with. Playing away from home is tough. Performing to your best abilities after travelling long-ish distances is tough. Being away from your families for something like half a year is tough. So tough that Rob Loe chose to extricate himself from this Breakers season at one point to return home to be with his wife and newborn child. The reaction from the Breakers was, shall we say, less than generous...
Of course despite them saying he would not return this season... he did. Only then he got injured. Just like everybody else.
All of the kiwi teams in Aussie comps had to battle with this situation and some handled it better than others. The Warriors, who have the most resource to call upon so this isn’t a coincidence, were comfortably the best set-up with their resort residence and the way they’ve been able to get locals (especially ex-pat NZers) to rally behind them. The NRL is also a competition where the number of kiwis outside the Warriors outweighs the number at the Warriors, it’s part of the sport for many players to move to Australia to chase the dream. Plus the Warriors already had heaps of practice at this having spent the majority of the 2020 season in Oz too. Point being that they were best accustomed to basing themselves overseas.
The Phoenix weren’t quite as flash mostly because they’re skint. They had less of a formal set-up, players and staff living in apartments in Wollongong. That kinda thing. And they definitely suffered from not having the level of home field advantage that they ordinarily would as the Nix missed out on the finals by a single pesky point.
As for the Breakers? Well of that trio they were easily the worst off. Unlike the other two, they didn’t get a trial run in 2020. The uncertainty about the start of the NBL21 season didn’t help either. Plus have an older squad where more of them have young families based in Aotearoa that they’d have to leave behind. To make matters worse they then had a string of bad luck in having to jump around from different home bases because of localised covid outbreaks. At various times they were based in Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania, and then finally all over Aoteaora by the end of it.
Now, those last seven games in NZ saw them go 3-4 so it wasn’t exactly an all-encompassing excuse. But clearly the pressure of living away was grinding on them, especially off the court. Clearly the fact that they couldn’t count on, same as the Phoenix and Warriors, one of the best home advantages in their competition – like, other teams usually have to travel to another country to play them – was a major bummer. Teams had at least two fewer hours of plane travel before playing the Breakers this season.
The whole thing was a huge disadvantage for the Breaks... and it showed. Worst of all was that there was nothing they could do about it. The whole scenario was (mostly) out of their control.
Although it wasn’t only stray bullets that they were catching. They planted a few in their own feet too...
Lamar Patterson & A Dodgy Roster
Things went wrong from day one, to be honest. Before day one in fact. Back in the offseason the Breakers made a couple of big splash signings. Tai Webster was one, convincing one of the very top Tall Blacks dudes to return to Aotearoa to kit up for the Breakers alongside his brother was huge. Fantastic get.
Then in hoping to avoid the stuttering start of the previous season where they had injuries, internationals, NBA exhibition matches, staff turnover and all sorts combining to where it wasn’t until about halfway through the season that the Breakers ever got things going... they chose not to wait on whether or not Scotty Hopson would be available after he dipped his toes in his homeland waters to see if he had any immediate NBA prospects. Instead they made the power play move of signing another premier All-NBL quality import in Lamar Patterson. Brought him over after a couple great stints with the Brisbane Bullets – normally it’s Breakers imports being poached by other teams not the other way around, right on. Hopson, meanwhile, did end up returning a couple months later and signing with Melbourne United.
Problem was that Lamar Patterson did not rock up as advertised. He arrived after a short term deal in Puerto Rico and suffice to say that he was not in good shape. Overweight and lacking in fitness, Patterson was largely awful for the Breakers. Aside from a fantastic fourth quarter in a win over Cairns – the only Breakers win of his six games – he looked sluggish and shot poorly. Not exactly what was needed for a team who were designed to rely extensively on its best few players to be the difference. In six games he shot 36.7% from the field, 22.2% from deep, and 58.6% from the free throw line. Then he got injured. The Breakers were left with no choice but to cut him.
That then had a knock-on effect because they couldn’t just bring in a new import straight away during a pandemic. Jeremy Kendle dropped by as a short term option but only played three games. Then eventually Levi Randolph was good to go. Randolph had a few quiet games but he also had a few excellent ones too. Averaging a shade under 15 points per game across 30 mins a night, and with shooting splits of 43.1%/33.3%/82.8% and some very decent defence, it’s hard not to wonder what might have been had he been there since the start of the term. But he wasn’t: Lamar Patterson was.
The top of the roster wasn’t the only problem. This went all the way down. Players were in and out with injuries – yeah, we’ll come back to that idea soon - and that meant that squad depth was tested... and exposed.
Honestly, it was the kiwi fellas who held it together. Tai Webster was asked to do way too much within the system but dammit he did as much as he humanly could. Brother Corey played through injuries but still found consistent ways to score. Finn Delany was fantastic throughout. Tom Abercrombie’s nominated for Defensive Player of the Year. Didn’t get a lot of Rob Loe to be fair but for a club whose commitments to the game in Aotearoa have been questioned quite a bit in recent times it was the Tall Blacks contingent who supplied most of the goodness this term. Just a pity there weren’t more of them. Both Jordan Ngatai and Tom Vodanovic were allowed to walk onto rival rosters last offseason, decisions that didn’t make sense at the time and made even less sense as the season progressed and the Breakers were left instead with players who could not replicate what those dudes did elsewhere.
Rasmus Bach was a surprisingly decent option for somebody that didn’t really have much of a profile before they found him – there’s a Breakers scout deserves a raise there – but Dan Trist was a non-factor the whole way. Only played 126 minutes all up. Colton Iverson took a few games to get going though once he did he proved one of the most reliable guys in the squad (whether ‘reliable’ is enough to expect from one of your only two imports is another matter). Kyrin Galloway struggled to make a positive impact early in his career despite some nice flashes. William McDowell-White was a mid-season pick-up who ended up playing a prominent role, and he’d have been superb if only his shooting matched his creativity. On the other hand Jarrad Weeks was so bad he was quietly shuffled off to Sydney late in proceedings.
Many of these dudes are good players. Very good players, some of them. But the Breakers lacked cohesion throughout the roster, they lacked complementary players, and while that’s obviously tricky to achieve when there are injuries/unavailabilities... the fact is that they did not put together the best roster that they could have. They were tinkering with it the whole way through, usually in positive ways but winning teams don’t need to make drastic changes on the fly, right? Every midseason transaction was an admission of a mistake. Well, that and the injuries...
Another Attack of the Injury Bug
All four of these ideas are interconnected. Like for example how injuries expose the depth of the roster and make everything look worse. And goddamn were there a lot of injuries. Corey Webster’s avocado attack in preseason should have been a cosmic warning of what was coming. Lamar Patterson very-not-shockingly ended his Breakers tenure injured. Tai Webster missed significant time. Tom Abercrombie too. Basically trying to list all the players who got injured along the way would take all night so instead let’s list the ones who didn’t get seriously hurt...
Played In All 36 Games: Finn Delany, Colton Iverson, Rasmus Bach
Played In At Least 30 Games: Finn Delany, Colton Iverson, Rasmus Bach
Played In At Least 25 Games: Finn Delany, Colton Iverson, Rasmus Bach, Tai Webster, Corey Webster, Thomas Abercrombie, Kyrin Galloway
Played In At Least 20 Games: Finn Delany, Colton Iverson, Rasmus Bach, Tai Webster, Corey Webster, Thomas Abercrombie, Kyrin Galloway, Daniel Trist, William McDowell-White
Nobody else played more than half the season. Most crucially, and it wasn’t only injuries here but being unfit is sort of like an injury, it’s a physical impairment of sorts... the main import spot. Lamar Patterson played six times. Levi Randolph played 15 times. That’s more than a third of the season where the team was without the services of two functioning imports. The standard of your overseas signings is often the tipping point for teams but the Breakers were stuck asking locals to match the production of opposition imports.
This all gets even worse if you go by minutes and not just games... Finn Delany played the third most minutes of any player for any team in NBL21. 1202 minutes, including two separate games where he played all 40 minutes and an overtime game where he played 42 and a half. He was by far the brightest spark of the entire campaign for this team, a brilliant breakout effort from him. But after that it drops off sharply. Colton Iverson is next at 18th in minutes played. Tai Webster is at 21 and Tom Abercrombie at 23. Then you drop down to Corey Webster at 39. Then Rasmus Back at 53.
The funky thing is that 9 (the number of teams) x 6 (the number of Breakers players just listed) = 54... so that’s exactly how many players they ought to have on average in that group. Yet we’ve established that a lot of them missed quite a few games. Which gets to the point that Dan Shamir has a tendency to ride his players pretty hard. Look at those two complete games from Delany. There would be quarters where he hardly made a sub at all, obviously he did not trust his depth players in a lot of situations.
Shamir also gave almost nothing to his two kiwi development players despite the season being a write-off: Isaac Davidson played 17 minutes (11 games), Taine Murray played 3 minutes (1 game). Bit of a weird one. But what really stings is that there was a crippling injury crisis last season too. Is this just gonna happen every season now or what? Those Breakers physios might wanna speak up more or something.
Are We Sure About Dan Shamir?
Dan Shamir took over as Breakers coach in strange circumstances. Kevin Braswell had been fired one year into a three year contract but some legal proceedings followed that decision. Proceedings which were never fully explained in public but were seemingly related to Braswell’s lack of a payout. They’d made him redundant rather than firing him... hence Dan Shamir was unveiled as ‘Director of Basketball’ rather than as head coach because, technically speaking, the head coach role no longer existed.
That ridiculous pretence has fallen away in his second season where Shamir is now pretty much exclusively talked about as ‘coach’ but the initial dramas meant the Isreali mastermind, who had never worked as a head coach outside of his home nation before, was in the country for more than a month before he could be unveiled.
Shamir has proved to be quite an enjoyable presence in his time at the Breakers so far. He has a subtle and wry humour which tends to sneak under the radar, plus he has this blunt honesty when talking about his team’s failings that is really refreshing considering the hyped-up media strategies of the rest of the organisation. Shamir seems like a switched-on dude. But that doesn’t make it any less odd that the team picked up his third-year option midway through the first season at a time when his team were lingering at 4-10. They’d almost turn that season around down the back stretch as Scotty Hopson helped rally the team to a 15-13 overall record however they still missed the playoffs.
Since arriving, Coach Shamir has been able to sprinkle his own appointments onto his coaching staff as he’s gone along and for year two he had the closest thing to a proper preseason he was going to get, able to work with all the local lads for an extended amount of time as NBL21 kept getting delayed. Putting it simply, he had time to craft things the way he wanted them, to impart his basketball ideas amongst the team. Then they finished 12-24.
Other excuses emerged... that’s the whole point of this article. But it still feels fair to say that Shamir has not gotten this team playing to the level that was expected. Their offensive structures were frustratingly basic, not nearly enough ball movement going on with the fewest assists in the comp. The turnover rate was also one of the highest in the league, as was their foul count. They were one of the slowest paced teams. The worst offensive rebounding team. Already mentioned that they had the fewest total points. Whiffing on Lamar Patterson was a huge blow and the injuries were a constant problem. Those weren’t Dan Shamir’s direct fault... but he also didn’t have enough variation to overcome those dramas.
Next season will be another funky one as the club get back on the Next Star wagon with teenaged French prospect Ousmane Dieng coming in. The RJ Hampton thing looks cool watching him win a Rookie of the Month award recently but let’s not forget that Hampton had zero positive impact on winning at the Breakers. In fact he’d already gapped it by the time the team started sorting that record out. Dieng will have less of a prominent role, he’s not a point guard. He can probably slip into a few different positions. It’ll be easier to make that work.
But it’s still not a win-now move. It’s a marketing move and that’s not really what a coach who is entering the last year of his contract having yet to make the finals would probably prefer. It has been noted that the coach’s name was conspicuously absent from that press release. Granted that’s probably just because the Next Star thing is Matt Walsh’s little baby and Shamir has at least spoken about working with the new boy in other media appearances. Olgun Uluc reported this week for ESPN that the Breakers: “remain extremely happy with the job Dan Shamir has done”. So there you go. Maybe next time?
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