Effort, pain, and a tough lesson for Breakers

Eight competitive quarters against the league’s top two sides in the space of three days should have delivered something for the New Zealand Breakers. Instead, a bruising stretch ended with no wins, mounting frustration, and growing concerns over a front court that may now be even more depleted.

A heartbreaking home loss to the Adelaide 36ers dropped the Breakers to 10-17, leaving them still two games behind the Tasmania JackJumpers at 12-15. But beyond the standings, the greater worry is the toll the stretch may have taken on their roster.

Already without Rob Baker II, who ruptured his ACL during the win over Cairns in Perth at HoopsFest on Saturday, the Breakers were hit again when his replacement, Max Darling, suffered a knee injury. Matters worsened further when one of the league’s hottest players, Sam Mennenga, took a heavy fall.

Mennenga went down while attempting to finish an alley-oop after Adelaide forward Zylan Cheatham got underneath him, a play that was ruled an unsportsmanlike foul. Head coach Petteri Koponen described the incident as a “dangerous play”, with the aftermath potentially significant.

“I think Sam might be pretty bad, it’s something with his wrist and we don’t know more until he has the exams, but it didn’t look good and he was trying to play and finish the game,” Koponen said.

“He still gave everything and played with the pain, and then with Max, we’re a little bit more optimistic and we’ll see. Now after this busy schedule when we were on the road, we’ve got two days off.

“We have to keep fighting and next week we’ll see whoever we’ve got, and the next man will need to step up like today Reuben (Te Rangi) had a great game again and gave us really good minutes like last time we fought against South East in the second half.

“The price feels bad, but we keep fighting and next week we regroup, we work and we keep fighting.”

Coming off a tight, high-scoring loss to the South East Melbourne Phoenix in Melbourne on Wednesday, the Breakers again showed their resilience on Friday night. Trailing by 10 points with just three minutes remaining, they surged late to force overtime.

The Breakers then controlled much of the extra period and still held a one-point lead with 9.7 seconds remaining and possession. But disaster struck when Karim Lopez was unable to get the ball inbounds, resulting in a five-second violation.

With the ball then in the hands of five-time MVP Bryce Cotton, Koponen watched his worst fears play out. Wanting Izaiah Brockington to stay attached to Cotton at all costs, a screen from Matt Kenyon forced a switch, leaving Mennenga isolated.

“As a coach you have to take responsibility from that and we couldn’t inbound the ball and they played good defence obviously, and that’s a costly turnover,” Koponen said.

"Then we couldn’t make a sub when we wanted to and then the plan was not to switch, we switched and Bryce made us pay, but that's just one situation.

"Flynn Cameron hit two big threes down the stretch also and obviously it hurts, and it's a bad way to lose the game, but we played a really good basketball team and one time when we were down 10 points we found extra energy to come back, and we had it.

"But this is basketball and tonight was 45 minutes and we couldn’t take it."