The talented and tenacious Finn Delany is back with the Breakers for the 2023-24 Aussie NBL season. MARC HINTON reports
Finn Delany was never done with the New Zealand Breakers. Not by a long shot. Even when he reacted to quite possibly the toughest, meanest, gnarliest campaign a professional sportsperson has ever faced by cutting ties and kicking loose to Europe for the 2022-23 hoops season.
That the season in question, with Baskets Bonn in the German Bundesliga and Champions Cup Europe-wide competition, turned into a runaway success, with Delany playing a key role in a team that suffered barely a handful of defeats, just made the decision harder. Success was intoxicating, and he wanted more.
Except he wanted something else, even more. He wanted to finish what he started at the Breakers. He wanted to come back to New Zealand and re-align with his home club and do what – let’s just say it – they had no chance to achieve while Delany was in his pomp and the Kiwi club were, well, at their worst.
Most of all, he wanted to team back up with head coach Mody Maor who took the club all the way to the championship series in his first year running the show at Atlas Place, and with whom Delany formed a strong bond while he was an assistant under Dan Shamir.
“I decided not to go back (to Bonn) just because I want to win here, which was the main reason for re-signing with Breakers,” explained Delany during his World Cup campaign with the Tall Blacks. “It was not about there at all. I really wanted to continue in Europe. For a long time that was a very strong pull. But when I looked at it through the lens of winning, and where I want to win, it was the Breakers – especially after the last two seasons I had there. To come here and give it everything, and to win, would be amazing.”
Delany was referring, of course, to his final two campaigns with the Breakers, in 2020-21 and ‘21-22 which the Kiwi club spent almost exclusively on the road, lurching from lockdown to shut down, from quarantine to restriction. Living out of suitcases, in hotel rooms, far from the comforts of home and the security of family, it became a form of hoops purgatory, which the Breakers negotiated more admirably in ‘20-21 (12-24) than they did the following season (5-23) when it all got just too much.
Delany, who had been a Breaker since 2015, was hooping the first of those Covid campaigns (16.2ppg, 6.8rpg, 2.1apg, and second-team all-NBL) when he was the only player to appear in all 36 games.
Next season there was a decided drop-off in productivity (10.0ppg, 5.5rpg, 2.0apg) as spirits, and competitiveness, sagged.
“It was mentally very tough,” he says of the season too far. “I needed to get away. I think the club needed new everything. So, in a sense it was good for the club that I left … I was fried. I think everyone was fried. It’s very unnatural for a year [like that] in a human’s life.”
Delany coped by heading, first, to the hills (“I went into the mountains, sort of to clear the head”), and then to Germany to further distance himself from the grind fest that was that second Covid season on the bounce.
But something nagged at him. “Unfinished business?” you wonder. The 2.0-metre Nelsonian just smiles. “Yeah, something like that. I would say it like this … in the end [the decision] was very simple, once I looked at it as I did. But to get to it was very tough.”
Maor was also a factor. The coach called Delany’s return “the highlight” of his off-season. “A lot has been made about how close we are,” adds Delany. “I’m very excited to play for him as a coach, but more just as a person. I believe he brings the best out in me. But I think he does that with everyone. That’s what he’s special with.”
There’s talk that Delany’s surprise Auckland return has tipped Maor’s rebuilt roster from so-so to go-go. He brings import-level quality in a local body. Mitch Creek-type impact. Delany certainly likes the look of a “balanced” roster that he considers champion quality. “It’s a youthful team, with a lot of people still on their upswing,” he says. “I’m very excited and think we have a real depth of intensity and talent in different positions, great coaching and culture, and good characters throughout.”
A group good enough to win it all? The prodigal son just grins and nods. That is, after all, why he came back.
* The Australian NBL tips off on Sept 28. The Breakers open at home against the Cairns Taipans on Sept 30.