The Breakers Have New Owners And They’re On A Mission Of Restoration
The shadows have lifted, the dark clouds have cleared, and the New Zealand Breakers have been sold. News came through on 20 March that a local ownership group had bought out Matt Walsh and mates, bringing to an end seven frustrating, confusing, inconsistent, and occasionally baffling years of foreign ownership. The price seems to have been consistent with what other NBL franchises have sold for or been valued at in recent years. Existing player and coaching contracts will be honoured, including head coach Petteri Koponen, but the front office has been cleaned out (and possibly fumigated).
There was some emphasis in the initial reports about the bummer of all those staff redundancies. It’s always stink when people lose their jobs but it does come with the territory in these instances and let’s not pretend that this takeover isn’t a welcome relief. Over the past seven years, the established culture and kiwi core of the franchise was gutted and replaced, promises were made to fans that were rarely kept, morally questionable decisions were made, logically questionable decisions were made... and most importantly of all the basketball sucked.
In the eight seasons prior to Walsh & Co taking over, the Breakers had a 142-82 regular season winning record (63.4%) with six postseason appearances including four championships and five finals. In the seven years that followed, the Breakers went 85-120 (41.5%) with two postseason appearances including one finals run. Stunningly, that finals run came immediately after the worst season in franchise history. It also happened to coincide with Matt Walsh moving back to America and probably leaving the fewest fingerprints upon the team that he did at any stage of his association with the team. But then the Breakers quickly reverted away from what made them so successful in NBL23 and you know how that turned out.
Breakers Seasons Under Matt Walsh & Company’s Ownership:
18/19: 12-16, Sixth Place
19/20: 15-13, Sixth Place
20/21: 12-24, Eighth Place
21/22: 5-23, Last Place
22/23: 18-10, Second Place, Beaten Finalists
23/24: 13-15, Sixth Place, Lost Play-In
24/25: 10-19, Ninth Place
We don’t need to dwell too much on this because it’s over. The kingdom has been liberated and we don’t need to worry. But just so that the rest of this article makes sense, we’re going to have to reluctantly run through the dramas of the past era... of which there were plenty. The Niche Cache archives are stacked with evidence of that. They got away with it for a long time partly because they talked a big game, partly because basketball doesn’t command as much mainstream media attention as it should. It’s only in the last year or two that proper pressure has been applied, mostly on account of the lack of kiwi players, but the damage began on day one... no doubt playing a big part in why the likes of Paul Henare (head coach), Dillon Boucher (general manager), Mike Fitchett (assistant coach), and plenty of others all gapped it in a hurry once Matt Walsh’s plans became clear.
That vision was tidily summarised by Walsh’s fixation with Next Star players. The very first bloke to walk that path was RJ Hampton who was given Mika Vukona’s #14 jersey and took precedence over Shea Ili’s playing spot – leading to Ili leaving for Melbourne United while Vukona’s number, inexplicably, still has not been retired. Developing basketball in this country was never a priority, it was always about flirting with overseas focus. To put it succinctly, since this yarn has already been written, the Matt Walsh Breakers may have claimed to care about Aotearoa basketball but very few of their actions ever backed that up.
Yeah but they’re a professional organisation, right? It’s their job to win games regardless of what nationality the players are. Sure, that’s true... but even aside from them being far more successful in the old days with NZ-heavy rosters, or the lone anomaly season when they were good being built around coach Mody Maor emphasising kiwi values, the fact is they didn’t win games. They only had two winning seasons in seven attempts while doing things this way. And even if they were winning games it wouldn’t have balanced out all of the embarrassing messes that kept happening under that regime.
Remember when Corey Webster asked to leave for an overseas offer after his outstanding 2018 World Cup and Walsh called him the worst starting two-guard in the league while denying the release... and then let him go six months later?
Remember when they tried to put Barstool Sports logos on the jerseys? Or for that matter how they changed the jersey colours to neon blue and hot pink because they matched the Miami Heat’s alternative kits... the Heat of course being the NBA team that Matt Walsh played for?
Remember how for several years the Breakers didn’t bother to use their development player spots? And when they did it was on international prospects like Terri Li and Princepal Singh... players not coincidentally from the two biggest populations on the planet? Although shout out to Princepal Singh because apparently he’s going to be playing for the Indian Panthers in the NZ NBL.
Remember when they signed Glen Rice Jr despite him having a long history of crap behaviour including having been kicked off a previous team that Dan Shamir coached for punching a teammate? Needless to say that didn’t last long with Rice sacked after only three games for getting arrested for fighting at the pub and then later breaking his bail conditions. Self-awareness is a difficult skill though...
Remember how it wasn’t until last season with Parker Jackson-Cartwright that the American-owned Breakers finally re-signed one of their imports?
Remember how they were the only team thirsty enough to still be doing NBA preseason games last season? The Breakers have played eight games against NBA teams, more than any other NBL team since the NBAxNBL connection began, happily doing so even when it meant interrupting their proper games.
Remember when Matt Walsh kept getting fined for complaining about referees, both during games and also on social media? One of those was for confronting the NBL commissioner, after which he made himself very conspicuous for the cameras at training the next wearing a personalised hoodie (sponsored by Barstool) that read: It’s Only Money.
Remember when they put up a billboard in Auckland appealing to LeBron James to sign with the team in 2018? At least that one was harmlessly tongue-in-cheek (if very lame), unlike the Corey Webster one they did in 2022 insulting a club legend who then dropped 26 points on them to lead the Perth Wildcats to a road win.
Remember when Matt Walsh put a fake Carmelo Anthony signing rumour in the team’s whatsapp group so as to expose a mole who was leaking stuff to the press?
Remember when Rob Loe left the team during the covid bubble so that he could be with his wife and newborn baby - his wife who is American and was stuck in New Zealand without much support – and the team immediately treated him like a traitor and said he wouldn’t play again that season? He did play again that season, by the way.
Remember how none of the best kiwi graduates from American colleges chose to sign with the Breakers for their first pro deals during those years? Sam Waardenburg, Yanni Wetzell, Flynn Cameron, Izayah Le’Afa, Sam Mennenga, etc. Several of them did end up playing for NZB later on but they all chose rival NBL teams when they were unproven.
Remember when the Breakers polished off a season with the fewest minutes ever given to New Zealand players in franchise history? You should because it happened last season... beating the record set the previous season.
Remember when the Breakers sent Sky Sport NZ a hard drive full of footage for their Unbreakable documentary series and the drive turned out to also have hundreds of pornographic videos on it?
Surely you remember last season when the Breakers started 7-3 despite all the odds to be leading the NBL ladder and then ownership forced them to swap their best defender, import Freddie Gillespie, for Senegalese big man Tacko Fall whose very unique skill set led to a complete alteration of the team’s tactics. Next thing you know they’d lost six games in a row all by double figure margins and would go 3-16 the rest of the way to finish second-to-last.
Remember when they gave Tacko Fall a two-year contract and told us that Freddie Gillespie had instigated things by asking for the release? Remember how Tacko Fall had already been training with the team long before that happened despite not having a contract? Remember when they were going to charge fans extra for a meet and greet with Tacko Fall when he wasn’t even a Breakers player yet?
Arguably the most egregious thing this ownership did (although the Glen Rice Jr saga runs it close) was to cut ties with coach Kevin Braswell one season into a three year contract but rather than pay him out they made him redundant by removing the role from their organisation. Yes, they actually told people that their professional basketball team would be operating without a head coach. Dan Shamir was hired to be “Director of Basketball” while Braswell took the Breakers to court in search of a settlement. Nobody was fooled by Dan Shamir’s glitzy title... and within a few years even the Breakers had dropped the conceit and begun calling him coach again. But you’d have to look long and hard to find a more utterly shameless bit of behaviour than that within the kiwi sports scene. Tragically, Kevin Braswell passed away in February 2025 after emergency heart surgery while coaching in Japan. He was only 46.
That’s not everything but, bloody hell, it’s more than enough to paint the picture. What’s funny is that the last thing the previous Breakers regime did (doubtful that Walsh was involved in this but you never know) was for “the outgoing front office staff” to release this message...
“Whilst the NBL25 season had ended sooner than we hoped, we as a front office were straight into planning for next season. We heard you, and were looking forward to revealing our new jersey design which was all but ready to unveil, combining our signature colours with a throwback to our legacy, the iconic New Zealand black as the hero. We had been working hard alongside the NBL to ensure our players had a more workable schedule, one that continues to bring the Breakers to the region, being a New Zealand team representing the entire nation. Following feedback, we decided not to go on the NBA tour next season. While this was amazing exposure for our brand and players, enabling our players the time to be match-fit and ready to be their best every single game was a more important priority. Whilst we can only hope the work we started is carried through to next season, we would like to say above all else, thank you. Thank you for the support we have received from our members and fans over the many seasons. Thank you for pushing us as a front office team to always aim higher. Thank you to everyone who has reached out to every single one of us at front office with kind words and support after what has been an unexpected and emotional week. We are all united in our passion for the Breakers, and that is unbreakable. Thank you, and farewell.”
So... basically, they were about to restore the proper jerseys, stop doing NBA silliness, find some more reasonable scheduling, better represent the nation they play in, and above all listen to the wants and desires of the fanbase. All the things they’ve been criticised for, they were going to fix... until the team was suddenly sold from out underneath them. Oh no what a horrid coincidence. If only they’d had more time!
Adios to the dumb stuff because this is where we get to the fun stuff. NZ-based American businessman Marc Mitchell will be the new major owner of the New Zealand Breakers – he’s a Californian “venture advisor” who has lived in Auckland for the past five years and is married to a New Zealander. Considers himself a local, fair enough. Mitchell has partnered with Wellingtonian businessmen Leon and Stephen Grice and also Sean Colgan, an American who has previous investment ties with the Grice Bros.
Mitchell was previously involved with the Breakers as a minority investor having bought into the franchise, and a place on the executive board, back in 2020. More recently, he was also at the head of a consortium that tried to buy the Auckland FC licence before Bill Foley’s crew won out. But it’s the fact that Marc Mitchell was involved in a hands-on (and wallet-open) way with the previous regime that is absolutely fascinating because so far everything that he has said and done seems to be a deliberate rebuttal of what Matt Walsh got up to.
The very first thing that got announced, even before the takeover confirmation, was that Dillon Boucher will be returning as the president of basketball operations. Different title but he’s effectively picking up where he left off once upon a time... having been doing excellent things with Basketball New Zealand in the meantime - which will only have strengthened his mana among New Zealand ballers. That’s not all. Former owners Paul and Liz Blackwell, whose top-down cultural impact were so important to the club’s championship era before Walsh & Friends bought them out, have also returned as shareholders (with Paul additionally serving as a director), while club legend Tom Abercrombie has been hired as a special advisor.
Marc Mitchell sat down for an interview with Marc Hinton for The Post the other day and this quote certainly stood out...
“We want to win on the court and we want to be leaders off the court. We are going to be a presence in our community and we are going to do things, quite frankly, the right way. We’re going to bring in people who are respected, who are honest and who people have history with and know their character. That’s important.”
Taking it further, Mitchell confirmed his intentions to “retool the Junior Breakers, we’re going to bring back the academy”. And based on all the “Back in Black” marketing it’s pretty clear that they’ll be reverting to the team’s actual colours again too. Whatever Walsh was doing, the new crew are going to do the opposite. Nobody’s going to be so uncouth as to say it out loud but actions speak louder than words (a lesson that Matt Walsh regularly taught us) and these actions are unmistakeable. Especially when they’re coming from kiwi basketballing insiders, some of whom were directly involved with the Walsh Breakers. They all saw what we saw: inadequacy disguised as progress, arrogance disguised as generosity, tackiness disguised as modernity, mediocrity disguised as... well, to be honest, they didn’t do a very good job of disguising the mediocrity. Ball don’t lie.
Another whim of the previous era was the hiring of Petteri Koponen as head coach. Kop’s a Finnish legend but was a first time head coach at senior level tasked with a rebuilding team in a league he had no experience with... it was a bonkers hire considering how many good local coaches were available (Judd Flavell applied unsuccessfully... then later got hired by Boucher and BNZ as the new Tall Blacks coach). Matt Walsh was always more interested in what would resonate with NBA people more than NBL people though.
By the way, this yarn has only skimmed past how wacky the Breakers media/PR stuff was during this time. An example of that would be how they outright lied to us about Koponen’s quailfications, referring to him as an “assistant coach” for the San Antonio Spurs in Summer League where actually he was one of six international “guest coaches” only there for professional development. Walsh also told us that this was “one of the most sought-after jobs in basketball outside of the NBA” less than two months after Mody Maor left the role early to sign with a middling team in Japan. Granted, that’s not nearly as bad as Dan Shamir telling everyone that he spent a year studying under Rick Pitino at the University of Kentucky only for Pitino to say he’d never even heard of him.
Despite it all, Coach Kop has turned out to be a pretty decent head coach. His basketball knowledge was never in question, the gamble was about whether he could translate that to NBL coaching but the success that he had in his first ten games proved that he could. He then had the rug pulled out from underneath him by the Tacko Fall addition – not Koponen’s fault at all – and things got awful from there. Yet through all the murkiness we still saw a Breakers team that was putting in a shift, which maintained its motivation during tough times, and that reflects well upon the coach too. One rare thing that the new regime has said they’re happy to roll with is Petteri Koponen’s position as head coach... and that seems like a wise move. Gotta have at least some continuity.
Which brings us to the playing roster. Free agency is imminent so this is all subject to rapid change but the squad that the Breakers inherited looks like this...
Under Contract: Sam Mennenga, Mitch McCarron, Sean Bairstow, Max Darling, Tacko Fall (import) & Karim Lopez (Next Star)... plus development players Carlin Davison, Alex McNaught & Kaia Isaac
Free agents: Parker Jackson-Cartwright (import), Matt Mooney (import), Mojave King, Jonah Bolden, Grant Anticevich, Tai Wynyard (injury replacement), Dane Pineau (retired)
However, there’s been an update there already because it sounds as though Carlin Davison will have his deal upgraded to full roster status, following some impressive minutes late last term and also his outstanding current form for Taranaki Airs in the NZ NBL. Love to see it.
Along with keeping the coach, Marc Mitchell has said he intends to honour the playing roster too. Be that as it may, there has been reporting from NBL circles that suggests they intend to wriggle out of Tacko Fall’s contract somehow. Fall has a player option for this season and has been happily chipping away playing in China in between seasons so he can probably be convinced to pursue alternative options, you know how it goes. Fall’s a worldwide journeyman so he understands the situation. Coach Kop did figure out some pretty useful ways to utilise Tacko Fall as the season progressed but none of it aligned with winning games so it’s probably best to move on and try get back to what worked in those first ten Koponenn games.
Beyond that, we’re in a strange situation now where kiwi free agents might actually prioritise joining the Breakers over other teams. Even when they have coaxed back guys like Yanni Wetzell, Izayah Le’Afa, and Finn Delany, none of them stuck around for very long. But we’ve come upon fresh horizons now so could Wetzell or Delany (or Isaac Fotu) be coaxed back from overseas? It’s not impossible. In the meantime, they ought to be taking a very close look at guys like Flynn Cameron and Hyrum Harris who are free agents. Would be a surprise if Shea Ili and Rob Loe are to leave Melbourne United but those two are in between contracts right now too (Loe has a team option), while Tai Webster, Tom Vodanovich, and Reuben Te Rangi round out the uncontracted contingent of NBL25 kiwis.
Since they’re doing the opposite of the last owners, they might as well go ahead and sign the best kiwi college graduate too. In a stacked class of players there is one bloke who stands above the rest: Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones. ATJ just won the 2025 Big West Player of the Year doing his thing for UC San Diego where in his senior year he averaged 19.1 points, 5.4 rebounds, and 3.6 assists per game as a 6’6 small forward. Only shot 31.3% from deep but he took more free throw attempts, get this, than any other player in NCAA Division 1 basketball last season.
Tait-Jones probably doesn’t have the raw athleticism and pure shooting that NBA scouts drool over so the draft is highly unlikely but NBA Summer League could be a go-er. At the very least, he’s good enough to settle immediately onto an Aussie NBL roster so this will be a great test of where the New Breakers are at, given how the Old Breakers continually missed out on guys of this graduate pedigree.
That leaves one final wrong that needs to be righted: Mika Vukona’s #14 jersey must be retired. CJ Bruton’s #23, Dillon Boucher’s #24, and Paul Henare’s #32 are already hanging in the rafters and Tom Abercrombie’s #10 has been promised to join them. The last ownership reign began with Vukona leaving and his number being given to an American prospect who didn’t even last a full season. The new one should begin in the opposite way, just like everything else they’re doing.
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