Basketball New Zealand

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NZ Breakers guard Kirk Penney (Photosport)

The Harvey Norman NZ Breakers have grabbed their first win of the Hummer NBL Championship season with a thrilling 98-97 victory over the Townsville Crocodiles at the North Shore Events Centre in Auckland.

Kirk Penney and Rick Rickert top-scored with 23 points each, Penney nailing 3-from-5 three-pointers to follow his strong performance in his debut match last week.

Townsville were in control for the first-half of the game and held a 15-point lead during the first-stanza, meaning the Breakers were always up against it.

But a huge second-half to the game from the Breakers dragged the home team back into the game, and once they hit the front early in the fourth-quarter, the victory looked assured.

A late Townsville run threatened to deny the Breakers, but a Phill Jones free-throw with six seconds left finally killed off the Crocs.

Breakers coach Andrej Lemanis was delighted with his team’s hard-fought victory.

After a slow first-half, he challenged the team to intensify its defensive efforts and it paid off in the second-stanza, when their all round play improved.

“Offensively, we worked a lot during the week on having a few go-to plays when we needed to score,” said Lemanis.

“And when something worked, the team were smart enough to go back to the play. Part of that is the team growing as a group.”

Wayne Turner experienced his first Hummer Championship victory with the Breakers, but had to watch the final points being scored after fouling out late in the fourth-quarter.

“It’s any player’s nightmare. It was horrible. The most important thing for me to do was to cheer Phill Jones on,” Turner said.

Lemanis was not happy with the number of shots missed by his team against the West Sydney Razorbacks in their last game and things started ominously this week – New Zealand missing its first six shots of the match before Oscar Forman finally stepped up to break their deadlock.

Shooting space was limited for New Zealand as the Crocs defence impressed and it was already eight points in arrears by the time hometown-hero Penney was introduced into the game.

Townsville was forced to shuffle things midway through the first-quarter after the potent Galen Young had his third foul called on him, but the benching didn’t break the Crocodiles rhythm and they took a 13-point lead to the first break.

The Breakers came out strongly at the start of the second stanza and scored a trio of three-pointers to cut the Townsville lead to 6 points. The fluency the Crocodiles showed in the first 12 minutes deserted them and space in the key dried up, but with the Breakers still missing too many shots, they lead stretched back out to 10 points with just a minute left in the half.

A Crocs three-pointer on the half-time buzzer gave the visitors a comfortable 48-59 lead as the teams headed into the dressing rooms.

The third quarter took a little while to get going, the game punctuated by fouls and missed shots. But the game sparked back into life midway through the stanza when the Breakers forced Townsville coach Trevor Gleeson to call a time-out with a six-point run.

Heading into the two-minute stretch, the Breakers cut the Crocodilesí lead to just one point, and had a three-pointer dropped 30 seconds out, the Breakers would have been level for the first time since early in the opening term. It didn’t, and a one-point gap was maintained – Townsville leading 73-72 at three-quarter time.

The moment the home-crowd had been waiting for came with 11.27 left in the game when Turner netted a two-pointer to put New Zealand in the lead for the first time.

With the Breakers on a roll and the crowd in full-voice, the slick movement and crisp shooting that so impressed in the first half seemed to desert the Crocs.

The Breakers stretched the lead to eight with just over five minutes left and the game suddenly looked beyond Townsville.

But the Crocs refused to lie down and managed to haul themselves back to within a point with just two-minutes left in the game to set up a huge finish. With 30 seconds left on the clock the scores were tied.

With just six seconds left on the clock Jones had two free-throws to grab the lead back, but was only successful with one.

This gave the Crocsí one final chance, but the ball never threatened the basket, to the audible relief of the home crowd.

Both the 1-2 Breakers and the 1-5 Crocodiles now host Adelaide in their next games.

Harvey Norman NZ Breakers 98 (Kirk Penney 23, Rick Rickert 23, Phill Jones 16) Townsville Crocodiles 97 (Corey Williams 26, Daniel Egan 17, Ben Pepper 14)
Box Score – Breakers v Crocs (html 53KB)