The Breakers coach captured lightning in a bottle in the 2022-23 NBL. But can he do it again with a different cast of characters? MARC HINTON report
Man, what a ride it was while it lasted. Mody Maor’s New Zealand Breakers, ultimate underdogs, remade roster, injuries mounting, travel schedule biting … unproven, unfeted, undaunted. Behind three of the best imports they’ve had through their doors, a teenage French prodigy, a rising Aussie star and a gaggle of role-players, the Kiwi hoops club bounced back to life in the 2022-23 Australian NBL with a fairytale run to the championship series.
Now, the trick is to recapture lightning in a bottle with a whole new cast of characters. Welcome to Mody’s world. Where the Breakers coach must conjure a championship calibre squad with the aid of smoke and mirrors, run on the smell of the proverbial oily rag.” Do more with less,” just might be this club’s unofficial motto.
Remember, the Breakers started last season coming off a 5-23 ‘21-22 campaign exclusively in Australia that very nearly broke them. They had just a trio of survivors from that never-ending road trip, a new head coach and a fan base that had waited three years to see their team play regular home games.
What unfolded was the stuff of fairytales. The Breakers went 18-10 through the regular season, including 11-3 on the road, finished second on the standings and played their way into a championship series for the ages against the defending champion Sydney Kings that went the distance and drew record crowds both sides of the Tasman.
In a perfect world Maor brings the band back for ‘23-24 (tipoff Sept 30) and gives them another shot at a title they came minutes from achieving in Sydney last March. But the Breakers coach operates in a far from perfect world.
“Continuity is a buzzword that is good for people that don’t understand sport,” he shrugs. “It doesn’t exist. There are five months between seasons. You want to keep the guys you really like in the building because it’s hard to find good people and players, but in reality, the process is the other way round.
“It’s analysing the basketball side, the mental side, the performance side … what did we do well basketball wise; what didn’t do well enough? What are areas we want to go from good to great, and from bad to good? And looking around at what other teams are doing. We are battling from a budget standpoint some juggernauts, so we need to be smarter with how we operate.”
Maor had three outstanding imports last season in Jarrell Brantley, Barry Brown Jr and Dererk Pardon. None will be back, because they showcased their talents so well for the Breakers, they have all gone on to bigger things, with much larger salaries.
The coach is not sad or mad about that. It’s the reality of his business. The Australian NBL is a relatively small-budget league, compared to Europe, Japan or China – their principal competitors for talent. And within that the Breakers are a low-spending club – only the Cairns Taipans spend less on players.
The roster, explains Maor, is built on the foundation of his vision for a style of basketball he believes in, refined by the lessons he’s learned from the campaign past, and throwing in the variable of what players he has at his disposal.
The latter is the really tricky part.
“Bringing the band back was never our goal,” says Maor. “It’s unattainable. We know the field in which we operate. If my goal is to create continuity, I need to sign players that aren’t that good, or are further back in their development. It’s not what I want. We want great players in the building.
“Nobody leaves hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table because they have fun or did really well. Last year we recruited players we felt were very good and hadn’t been able to show it yet because of circumstances. We believed in our ability to allow them to show this, and to further their careers.
“This is exactly what happened, and what’s going to happen again and again and again.”
So Maor will recruit three more talented, hungry, slightly under-the-radar imports (1.96m forward Zylan Cheatham is his first, two more are to come). He has also lost veteran Tall Black Rob Loe (to retirement) and hard-nosed Kiwi forward Tom Vodanovich (to a higher-paying deal in the Philippines). In comes Aussie/South Sudan big Mangok Mathiang, journeyman Australian centre Dane Pineau and 21-year-old Lithuanian Next Star Mantas Rubštavičius to supplement the “local” core of star re-signing Will McDowell-White, Tom Abercrombie, Izayah Le’afa, Dan Fotu and Cam Gliddon.
In many ways he starts the ascent again at the base of the mountain
“Is it going to be really hard? Yes,” he says. “It’s really hard to be a good coach. It’s really hard to be a good basketball team. I intend to bring in better players than Barry, Jarrell and Dererk. We’re not trying to replicate what we had last year – we want to be better.”