The Breakers Were Wooden-Spooners, Now One Year Later They’re NBL Finals-Bound
It’s not supposed to happen that a team finishes dead last one season then surges into triumphant championship contention the next. Standard convention says that it takes time to traverse that distance. Usually gotta embark upon one of those infamous rebuilds for a couple years first. No doubt there are exceptions, such as when a star player gets injured and everything goes awry but then it’s all back to normal by the next term. This ain’t that though. The New Zealand Breakers were awful and now they’re great. With no buffer whatsoever.
What the Breakers have achieved this season has not been the result of steady forward progress, it’s been a turnaround as sudden and unexpected as a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. Except, like, for real. No sleight of hand just legitimate magic. At least that’s the way it has felt seeing the New Zealand Breakers go from wooden spooners to grand finalists in consecutive seasons.
It still boggles the mind. The Breakers had been on a steady slide for several years. Last season they reached rock bottom so the only way left to go was up... but surely nobody (outside the Breakers organisation) saw them fixing so many issues so drastically and as suddenly as they did. At first you had to wonder if it was merely a quick start, that things would revert back to mediocrity (albeit mediocrity would still be an improvement after the club’s worst ever season). Yet the games kept coming and the Breakers kept winning.
The only time they hit the skids was due to injuries and a sneaky bit of covid (leading to a hectic schedule) but they came out of that with a thrilling win away to the top team before finishing the regular season on a five-game win streak. Then they did the business in the semis, taking down the Tasmania JackJumpers 2-1 thanks to a pair of impressive home victories in front of a raucous Spark Arena crowd. Three more victories, against the Sydney Kings, and there’ll be a new banner hanging in the rafters. It’s just like the good old days.
The reasons for that magical turnaround aren’t secret. It’s there for all to see (and was written about midseason). They replaced an underperforming coach with an excellent and immediately inspiring one. They absolutely knocked their three import recruitments out of the park. They pivoted from an array of random depth signings to restock their roster with strong and reliable kiwi performers. They made a priority of the defensive aspects of the game. They restored a strong team culture built around great leadership (from both the coach and from senior players).
And, yes, they also no longer had to spend the bulk of the damn season stuck stranded in Australia – although don’t fall into the trap of blaming all the club’s recent struggles on the pandemic, the patterns of failure had been clear long beforehand and covid only exposed those things further. As difficult as it no doubt was, the covid yarns weren’t as much of an excuse for the Wellington Phoenix or even the NZ Warriors.
No need to rehash those thoughts any further – other than to add that Mody Maor was absolutely robbed in the Coach of the Year category at the NBL23 awards. Barry Brown Jr did deservedly get honoured as the Sixth Man of the Year by a comfortable margin, although Will McDowell-White missed out on Most Improved by two spare votes to Keanu Pinder of Cairns. Dererk Pardon fell three votes short of Antonius Cleveland for Defensive Player of the Year, potentially splitting votes with the bro Jarrell Brantley. Cleveland’s great but Pardon is the defensive leader for the best defensive team, although at least that was a legitimate debate. Pardon and Brown also made All-NBL Second Team.
Nah, what needs doing here is to illustrate this remarkable turnaround. Explore the shifting of the sands. Marvel at the evolution. Starting with the obvious one: Wins.
Last season the Breakers went 5-23. That’s a winning percentage of 17.9% which was the worst in the club’s history. Even in the early years of the franchise they never stooped near such a dismal number as that. You have to go back to 2006-07 for the last time the Breakers only had a single-figure win tally and that was still a 9-23 effort (repeating the record of the year before – those were the two previous franchise lows). This season they went 18-10 with a win percentage of 64.3%.
This isn’t entirely unprecedented. Quick bit of research reveals that the South Dragons once took it even further. Back in 2007-08 they had a tumultuous time on the way to a 5-25 record – current Tall Ferns coach Guy Molloy was the interim boss for the last four games of that term (during which they snapped a 14-game losing streak). The next season they hired Brian Goorjian as head coach and overhauled their roster then went 22-8 and won the championship. One of those new recruits was Mika Vukona. The South Dragons franchise was then dissolved before they could defend that title.
Since the Breakers were born, there have been 25 instances of a team finishing a season with a single-figure win tally and the Breakers are the ninth of those teams to have a winning record immediately afterwards. It’s actually been more common in recent years, which makes sense given the NBL seems to be deeper, more competitive, and also more volatile than ever before. Every team is capable of bringing in strong imports thanks to the league’s reputation. Teams aren’t going defunct on the regular. The road back to contendership isn’t as long in this competition as it is in many others... but you’ve still gotta get it done somehow.
For the Breakers, the tale of their turnaround is pretty much encompassed in their defensive shift. They weren’t just bad on defence last season, they were atrocious. They aren’t just good on defence this season, they’re the best in the business...
In NBL22 they allowed 88.5 points per game, ranking ninth out of ten teams.
In NBL23 they allowed 80.2 points per game, ranking first.
So much of defence comes from mentality. You’ve got to be locked-in, you’ve got to be in alignment with the rest of your team, you’ve got to want to play defence. The Breakers were miserable last time and they’re thriving this time. That’s laid the platform for some prime defensive intensity. From last season to this, opposition players have gone from shooting 48.1% from the field (worst in the comp) to 43.2% from the field (second best in the comp). That same pattern is even more stark when it comes to perimeter defence with a 35.9% three-point success rate against them (last) dropping to a 31.5% rate against them (first). Literally from worst to first. Get that into ya.
Same deal is there with assists allowed. 17.9 per game to 14.6 per game: worst to first. And their Defensive Rating portrays the same yarn, shaving more than 10 points per 100 possessions off that stat. From 115.9 to 105.5. You’ve probably already guessed it but we’re talking about another worst to first metric right there. Astonishing efforts.
Offensively it’s not quite as drastic. It doesn’t need to be. A profound defensive nudge each week keeps you in most games and means that good offence is good enough offence. But they have improved heaps on that end too. From Barry Brown’s heroic ability to get to the rim to Jarrell Brantley’s multi-level shooting and Dererk Pardon’s post-ups and put-backs. Chuck in some far superior outside shooting thanks to a healthy Tom Abercrombie and recruits such as Izayah Le’Afa and Cam Gliddon – plus a proper return to the rotation from Rob Loe. Offensive Rating of 104.5 (ninth) rising to 113.8 (fifth). Solid leaps in shooting percentages (42.2 to 46.2 FG% / 30.7 to 36.0 3P%). NZB’s Net Rating was -11.4 (last) in NBL22 and +8.2 (second) in NBL23.
The only reason they aren’t first in a couple of those other stats, specifically the net rating, is that the Sydney Kings have been even better. Of course it’s a different story for the defending champs to be at that level than it is for the league’s reigning cellar dwellars to get there. However none of that will matter when the Grand Final Series begins. Five games, three away and two at home (alternating each time). The two best teams in the competition facing off to decide who lifts the trophy – can’t ask for better than that.
It’s hard not to feel stoked for Mody Maor after how he’s led this resurgence. For the first time since the Blackwell Era it’s felt like the Breakers are functioning with all their energies targeted in the same direction. That’s down to Coach Mody. He’s the one who rocked up with a clear vision for this team and then followed it through to perfection. He didn’t just demand his team play mean defence, he signed players who could live up to that. He brought in imports who provide energy rather than sapping it. Even their Next Star, Rayan Rupert, fits the bill as a committed defender who puts the team before himself.
Mody Maor: “The beautiful thing about basketball is that every season is a new book, not even a new chapter, and we knew exactly what kind of people we wanted in the building. That’s where it starts. The second thing we knew was how we wanted to play and we brought in people that fit what we wanted to do on defence and who we wanted to be as an organisation and as a team. Those were the first steps and the main ones.”
It’s hard to comprehend how completely the Breakers flipped things around in one season, it’s also hard to comprehend how Maor was part of that previous regime as the main assistant coach to his mate Dan Shamir. But these things aren’t always so simple. Head coaching and assistant coaching are two distinct jobs. The responsibilities are different. The tasks are different. All there is to say is that Mody Maor has risen to the job with brilliant proficiency. There’s always buzz from the Breakers about the players they’re hoping will crack the NBA soon... well, here’s a coach who wouldn’t go astray as an assistant at that level himself.
Maor’s contracted for two more seasons so hopefully that’s not something that happens too soon (although you can’t deny the bloke a promotion after what he’s achieved already). When one bloke has been as influential in the team’s success as that you do worry about what things would look like beyond them. The good thing is that the blueprint is there for success beyond Maor. It was there before him when the franchise were winning championships. He then revived it to prove that the formula still works.
Owner Matt Walsh knows the value of his head coach. He’s been doing the media rounds ahead of the NBL Finals, giving interviews to most of the prominent NZ outlets where he’s said that much and more. The irony here is that it was Walsh and his ownership group who took the Breakers away from that formula in the first place. Now that things have swivelled back around they’re straight away preparing for the finals.
The criticism of the first four years of the regime was legitimate and Walshy hyping up the Dan Shamir years as a sort of transitional period in moving towards his “vision” doesn’t change the fact that the team sucked (outside of the last half of Shamir’s first season, when Scotty Hopson went nuts) and that the apparent embedding of higher professional standards wasn’t very obvious when they made the previous coach redundant (presumably to avoid paying him out?) and hired a ‘Director of Basketball’ instead - a tag which strangely disappeared after one season. Nor when dudes were getting slushed on airplanes, players and staff were gapping the scene, the club signed notorious knobhead Glenn Rice Jr, the social media team carried on like trolls, et cetera.
But what you do have to admit is that Walsh and company (it’s mostly Walsh) have always listened and adjusted from year to year. Not always successfully. Not always without reservation. However it has eventually gotten us to where we are now: finals-bound. The path isn’t always going to unfurl in a straight line. Just goes to show that no matter how chaotic things may appear, you get the right people involved and the end-goal might be a lot closer than you realised.
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