Maor: "Circumstances stacked against us"

After the giddy highs of last season’s Championship Series appearance, the New Zealand Breakers have come crashing back down to earth in NBL24, and currently sit bottom of the ladder five rounds into the new season.

The Breakers currently possess a 1-4 record, having played fewer games than every other team in the competition bar fellow NBLxNBA participants Cairns.

Only one of New Zealand’s four defeats this season has come by more than 10 points – a 12-point defeat to Adelaide – and the Breakers beat their next opponent, Cairns, in its opening game of the season.

Head coach Mody Maor lamented the circumstances around the side’s slow start, following a three-point loss to South East Melbourne.

“I’m going to do something I never do,” Maor said. “I’m going to state the circumstances have been stacked against us from the beginning, and I’m saying this because I want our fans to hear it.

“We knew we had a tough stretch coming into the season, we had the most players out of anybody in the league going to the World Cup [and] a very disrupted pre-season because of it.

“Over the course of the pre-season, while we got players back, we kept losing players to injury.

“We lost Will (McDowell-White) for six weeks, then we lost Finn (Delany) for six weeks, then we lost Mantas (Rubstavicius) for six weeks, we lost (Justinian) Jessup for the whole season and now we have lost Zylan (Cheatham for six to eight weeks).

“These are not excuses, these are the circumstances with which we have been faced. Out guys are doing everything I ask of them every day. They are working as hard as can be.

“Our fans should be proud of the amount of effort our guys put in, they should be proud of how much these guys care, and they should know we will not stop working until we start winning games.”

A bright spot in the Breakers’ disrupted season so far has been the performances of import guard Parker Jackson-Cartwright.

Jackson-Cartwright scored 33 points against the Phoenix off the back of another strong individual showing against Adelaide, to earn a nomination for the Round 5 Chemist Warehouse Fans MVP.

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‘PJC’ echoed Maor’s sentiments following the narrow loss to the Phoenix.

“It’s a bit of an unusual circumstance, especially with all the adversity we hit early on,” Jackson-Cartwright said.

“We haven’t cried about it or tried to make excuses within our group and club. We approach every day business as usual.

“This is all part of the process. It’s a long season, some seasons have this adversity whether it’s at the beginning, middle or end.”

The Breakers face the Taipans on Friday, November 3 at 5:30pm AEDT, before they travel to face the Kings in a Championship Series rematch on Sunday, November 5.