New Zealand, Adelaide shake up six

The race to finish in the NBL's top six was thrown another curve ball on Saturday night with the New Zealand Breakers and Adelaide 36ers winning impressively to keep themselves in the hunt.

It's the top six teams that will be part of the finals this season again in the NBL with the top two guaranteed a place in the semi finals, and then the next four fighting in play-in games over those last two positions.

The Breakers and Sixers are still in the hunt after their wins against South East Melbourne Phoenix (9-14, last) and Illawarra Hawks (9-12, eighth).

New Zealand snapped a three-game losing slide in emphatic fashion putting the sword to the now bottom place Phoenix.

The Breakers won by 31 points to improve their percentage significantly in the process as they rise to seventh spot at 9-12 just behind both Cairns and Brisbane at 11-12.

Anthony Lamb celebrated his 26th birthday with an NBL career best 31 points on 11-of-14 shooting, but it was an all-round team effort from the Breakers which coach Mody Maor hopes they can continue.

"I know we have this in us, they (the players) do too, and now it's time we bring it every quarter, every minute all the time," he said.

"We just have to stay the course and it's really not the time to reinvent the wheel in any way, shape or form.

"We know who we are, we know what we look like when we play well, and we know how this feels and the mindset we need to be in to play that way. That's all we need to maintain."

The 36ers are becoming quite the story too under interim coach Scott Ninnis with the club Hall of Famer, in his second stint as a head coach, lighting a fire under his team.

The Sixers are out of bottom place now at 9-14 having won four of the last five games with Isaac Humphries (18 points, 10 rebounds), Trey Kell III (26 points) and DJ Vasiljevic (14) terrific again against Illawarra.

Kyrin Galloway continued to step up in the absence of import power forward Jacob Wiley with another 13 points, six rebounds and three blocks as they handed the Hawks a third straight defeat.

Ninnis might not want to talk about finals, but he's not afraid to dream either.

"No, hell no, we're not talking about finals," Ninnis said with a smile.

"In the back of your mind you always dare to dream and think about things, but we've had no conversation about that as a team.

"We've got 14 losses so we have no margin for error but there's no team in the competition that scares us, and we're playing a brand of basketball that's hopefully exciting to watch and play as a group.

"The last thing we're going to do now is get ahead of ourselves and all we can focus on is Cairns at home next Saturday night.

"We owe them because we felt we should have beaten them last week before losing in overtime after being up 16 in the third quarter."