The Breakers Are Not A Very Good Basketball Team Right Now (And You Can't Just Blame Covid)
The Breakers were supposed to be playing the Cairns Taipans on New Year’s Eve but covid protocols saw an end to that possibility. One of a number of games that have been postponed in the NBL lately... giving the Breaks a sneaky two weeks off after losing to the Tasmania Jack Jumpers on Boxing Day. Bit of a stink one after they requested to have their season opener postponed after their own covid outbreak (which briefly put their coach in hospital) only to be turned down. Apparently they were just ahead of the curve.
Keeping the buzzkill going, the Breakers are also looking less likely to be able to make up all their missing home games as omicron variant dramas will now keep the borders of Aotearoa closed for longer than hoped. They’re currently stuck away from home without any certainty. They’ve already had one internal covid outbreak and the way it’s spreading around Oz at the moment isn’t exactly encouraging. They’re doing it tough right now. They did it tough last year for similar reasons. Almost all of their crossover kiwi media coverage is focussing on that doing-it-tough-ness as they’ve stumbled from defeat to defeat to start this season.
To put it bluntly, they’ve lost six games on the trot and already their season is on the brink. Ah but here’s the thing... the Breakers don’t suck because of covid. The Breakers suck irregardless of covid and that covid situation is running a convenient blocking play for an 0-6 record during which they’ve been nothing short of atrocious on defence and inconsistent on offence. When you’re a bad defensive team, the margins are so slim. As soon as your offence slips up for a few possessions the floodgates threaten to open. Clearly injuries and covid have not helped... but a lot of what we’re seeing are merely the same damn trends that have been seen since the franchise changed ownership a few years back.
These six defeats put them at 39-59 since Matt Walsh’s consortium took over. During that 0-6 start they’ve managed to whip up their tied-lowest scoring half ever (23 points in the first half vs SEM) which eventually became their biggest ever season opener defeat (24 points). They’ve also managed to break a franchise record for biggest half-time lead blown as they quite incredibly went from 59-42 up at HT versus Adelaide to lose 98-85. Not only did they toss a 17-point lead but they lost by 13 in the end. Outscored by 30 points in the second half. That game was followed by a really promising overtime defeat to the in-form Illawarra Hawks in double overtime... but they were trounced by 23 points by Melbourne United a few days later. Then in what felt like their best shot at a much-needed win they suffered a really disappointing loss to the expansion team Tasmania. It’s been awful, no doubt about it.
Just how awful? Let us look at a few numbers...
The Breakers are shooting a miserable 27.3% from three point range while their opponents drill them at 42.4%... no other team is allowing worse than 33.9% from deep.
The Breakers are allowing opposition teams to shoot at 47.9% from the field, comfortably the worst in the competition.
The Breakers are serving up a league-worst 13.2 assists per game while allowing a league-worst 18.5 assists per game.
They’re also getting the fewest steals per game (3.7), the fewest offensive rebounds per game (8.3), the second fewest total rebounds per game (34.7), and the fewest blocks per game (3.7).
Needless to say they’re also giving up three more points per game than any other team (91.0).
See, it’s not a good thing to be down the very bottom of any stat category but to be crawling through the sludge on pretty much all the major defensive categories is utter carnage. There is bad, there is very bad, and then there’s whatever the hell this is...
The Breakers are broken with a defensive rating more than 15 points worse than the league average. This isn’t just some small sample size fluke of catching hot shooters all at once either. Six games is more than enough to get the beginnings of a handle on a team and the Breakers are incapable of guarding hardly anyone. Two or three quick passes and they’re sliced to bits. Opposition big men and outside shooters are slaying them.
This will get at least a little better. Surely it will. Tom Abercrombie was pumped up as a Defensive Player of the Year candidate by the club last season, which was a bit of a stretch but he probably is their best defender and has only played 16 minutes so far this term. Peyton Siva went down injured in game two and has since been temporarily replaced on the roster by Chasson Randle (who was ready to go surprisingly quickly after Siva’s injury diagnosis – Breakers with their contingency plans in place). Randle was a little rusty his first game up with 1/7 shooting from deep but he’s too good to linger like that for long. Their other major import Jeremiah Martin has missed time too.
Supposing that the team stays healthy then those dudes will lead them to a few wins eventually. But they won’t fix everything. This is still a team with, effectively, two Next Stars on the roster. They knew from day one that having them would come at the expense of some of their cohesiveness (especially defensively) and that was the risk that they took. How’s that working out? Well Hugo Besson has been superb as a scorer. Really exciting player, capable of spotting up but also creating off the dribble. Hugely skilled guy with the ball in hand who’s also bigger than you initially think too.
Haaaaving said that... the 20 year old has struggled in the last couple matches after putting the league on notice. Three straight 20+ scoring games followed by 14 points combined on 6/24 shooting against Melbourne and Tasmania. 0/10 from deep in that stretch. Things will bounce back up for him before long, he’s too good of a shooter for them not to, but these inconsistencies are exactly why winning teams don’t rely on their young stars as top options. As for his defensive output... yeah straight up terrible. Going by the SpatialJam numbers, he has the worst defensive BPM in the entire NBL.
Finn Delany is second worst which is not a great reflection of a fella who ought to be having much more of a positive impact than he has done to date. However with Delany, he’s playing 38 minutes per night – including 46:18 mins in the 2OT loss to the Hawks – plus he’s defending on the wing next to guys like Besson and Ousmane Dieng so there’s an element of being dragged down here. Needs to knock down a few more shots though. Only 37.3% from the field and 29.3% from 3pters. Finn Diesel’s better than that.
And Ousmane Dieng’s plain and simply not been very good. The thing to remember is that NBA draft scouts/writers are not looking at team context or anything when they tweet out happy clips of Dieng and Besson. They don’t care if the Breakers lose every game, most of them probably aren’t even looking at the final result. They just wanna see glimpses of talent which can translate to the NBA. Dieng and Besson both have that in bundles but this early in their development it’s unbalanced talent which is not helping the Breakers to wins. Dieng is only getting 17 minutes per game. He has shot 2/21 from outside the perimeter and has the worst overall BPM in the competition (second is Besson, Delany is fourth worst).
On the positive side, William McDowell-White has been amazing so far. He was already a decent defender from the point with good size and mobility. He was already a very good passer too. But he was a limited player joining mid-season last time because of his wild scoring variations. However this time around he’s discovered his jump shot and has legit been the team’s best player through these six games. 43.6% shooting from range, 44.6% overall. 11.2 points, 5.7 rebounds, 3.8 assists per game. Finally a player that the Breakers have actually developed and improved to where they actually see some benefits. Finn Delany is about the only other bloke you can put in that category.
So what did these Breakers then do? They signed a guy in WMW’s exact position as their injury replacement. Yes, Chasson Randle was a direct swap for Peyton Siva. But give how well WMW had done in Siva’s absence and how shockingly poor their defence has been... perhaps a wing or at least a combo-guard would have been more suitable?
The thing is, every year the Breakers talk up how their latest roster is a championship calibre unit and every year it turns out that poor recruitment has killed them. They’re using a valuable import spot on a Next Star in Hugo Besson. Isaac Davidson was given the final roster spot before they flew over and even with injuries in the team he’s only played three minutes in six games. Kyrin Galloway isn’t getting many minutes. Rob Loe seems to have lost all trust whatsoever from Dan Shamir – Loe left the team early last term when his wife gave birth to their first child and was pretty much given a middle finger farewell from the club. He does not look to be enjoying his basketball a whole lot right now. Rasmus Bach has been a black hole on offence but an occasionally necessary plug on defence, an awkward balancing act for the coach.
Chuck that all into the pot together and Dan Shamir’s not got much of a bench to work with. Hence he rides his main starters extremely hard with big minutes. Same as he did last season. And the season before. Then you wonder why this team seems to suffer from perennial injury crises, right? It’s not a coincidence.
The strategy is the same as it has been under Dan Shamir the entire time. It’s talent > fit and figure it out later. Except they’ve never figured it out. Shamir is now 27-43 as the head coach (/director of basketball) and yet he’s had one contract option picked up and been given a separate extension. On what evidence, exactly? To be fair the bigger drama is that they keep signing players who don’t seem to be able to play together which is a general manager problem. But most coaches live on the hot seat. Shamir has done nothing but underachieve yet the wider covid context of this team has shielded him from the usual chaos.
Yanni Wetzell has also been very good. He’s rebounding and he’s scoring and he’s generally just having a strong impact out there. You always know when Yanni’s on the floor. Based on the games that he’s missed (including in preseason) it’s pretty obvious that the team is lost down low without him. Sam Timmins finally got a run with a solid enough 15 mins against Melbourne in game five but otherwise hasn’t really been seen. Princepal Singh has dressed for several games and gotten nowhere near the court.
Oh which reminds me: Matt Walsh did a Twitter Q+A a few weeks back during which he offered this nugget...
“The best thing for basketball in NZ is to grow globally. (IMO)”
That mindset tells you a fair bit about why the only professional team in Aotearoa has been using development contracts on guys like Terry Li and Princepal Singh whilst going hard on these international Next Stars and flirting with ESPN interactions (also Barstool - *vomit noises*) and other yarns that make for nice headlines and retweets but have distanced the franchise further and further from their past successes.
In my opinion, guys like Dieng and Besson and RJ Hampton are getting where they’re going regardless of any Breakers influence and NZ basketball doesn’t gain bugger all outta the process. Signing guys who were already gonna be drafted no matter where they played that final year and then taking credit for their entire journey is pretty hilarious. In fact the evidence seems to be that RJ Hampton’s draft stock was weakened by his Breakers gap year – probably why the team has pivoted to foreign prospects rather than American ones now. One Australian NBL team is not powerful enough to break up the USA college machine.
Before all this I wrote a piece entitled ‘Will This Be The Season That The Breakers Actually Live Up To The Hype’. Doesn’t look like it will be. The next question is will this be the season that the wider public finally looks past the twitter memes and the ESPN headlines and realises that this whole regime has been an absolute shambles. Or maybe they’ll win a heap of games and surprise everyone in making the semis after all, who knows.
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