The Tall Ferns hit up this Asia Cup with a clear target in mind: a top four finish. Make the semi-finals of this tournament for the first ever time, see if they can’t win a medal while they’re at it, and most importantly stay in the hunt for Olympic qualification
It was a season like none other for Aotearoa’s finest basketballing export. For half of it he was an unstoppable rebounding machine even by his own high standards. Then he got injured.
The FIBA Women’s Asia Cup is taking place in Sydney, Australia next week and the Tall Ferns have a task ahead of them. Winning this thing may not be realistic but that’s fine, the real task is getting into the top four
New Zealanders are steadily infiltrating the Australian NBL and folks are slowly starting to notice… although those on this side of the Tasman Sea understand that this is not a new trend
The first thing that needed doing this offseason was consolidating the playing roster. They’d had a brilliant campaign, come up narrowly short in the finals where they were beaten in the decisive game five, but pretty much their entire main rotation were off contract
The Memphis Grizzlies came to an inglorious conclusion as they were bounced in the first round by a seventh seed. Steven Adams didn’t play a single game after the month of January and that whole situation has been kept annoyingly murky
The whole Next Star journey has been a strange one for the Breakers but as their latest foreign prospect officially declares for the NBA Draft it seems as though they’ve finally figured it out
Breakers recruitment this season was top notch and for once they’ve actually got the structure, the success, and the coach to be able to do something they have not yet done since the change in ownership: retain an import signing.
They said it’d be 3-5 weeks before Steven Adams could return from his knee strain. The All Star break fell at roughly the four week mark but he wasn’t quite ready to go at the end of it. The fifth week also went by. Then a sixth and then a seventh.
As the final buzzer sounded in the Pac-12 Women’s Basketball championship final, it was fitting that the ball happened to be in the hands of Charlisse Leger-Walker. Almost like it was scripted by destiny
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
It happened on the final play of a two-point loss to the Phoenix Suns. The Memphis Grizzlies were trying to avoid a second straight defeat having had their 11-game winning streak broken a few days earlier
And so ends a thrilling, controversial, chaotic, and baffling era in the NBA. Back in July 2019, Brooklyn Nets general manager Sean Marks made a massive franchise-altering decision to ditch the humble but successful grassroots rebuild he’d embarked upon to that point…
There were 16.1 seconds remaining in the game between the Memphis Grizzlies and Cleveland Cavaliers when Steven Adams supplied with the game-winning field goal. Cometh the moment, cometh the Funaki.
The Memphis Grizzlies hit the skids recently and it was not a pretty sight to see. A spell of seven consecutive wins flittered away in a hurry with four defeats from five games from in the back half of December
Steven Adams is a clutch-time basketballer. Probably not to the level where he’s gonna be in contention to win the new The Jerry West Trophy awarded to the Kia NBA Clutch Player of the Year, but…
Scream it from the bell towers: the Breakers are back. We’re halfway through the NBL season and this is not a drill. The New Zealand Breakers are winning games and playing lockdown defence
Something very consequential happened between the first Kiwi Steve write-up and this second one: Jaren Jackson Jr returned to the basketball court. JJJ missed the first 14 games of the season as he recovered from offseason foot surgery…
We are now a couple of weeks into the new NBA season. The dust has settled. The trends are emerging. The cream is already rising to the top. The sample sizes aren’t quite so small.
The focus of this Memphis Grizzlies off-season can be summed up in one word: continuation. A young team, many of them drafted by the organisation, who had their first proper playoffs run last time out...