Basketball: New Zealand Breakers and Wellington Phoenix join forces as Australia beckons

Finn Delany had an impressive campaign for the NZ Breakers last season. Photo / Photosport

The New Zealand Breakers and Wellington Phoenix are about to get a lot more familiar with one another.

On Monday, the two teams will fly out of Wellington on a charter flight for Australia together, with both set to be based across their ditch for their upcoming ANBL and A-League campaigns.

"I think, all in all, it's going to be a cool experience having two teams that represent the country in an Australian league sharing a flight together," Breakers chief executive Matt Walsh told the Herald.

"A lot of the credit is to the Phoenix. Our GM Simon Edwards has done an incredible job working with the Phoenix to get all of this organised and I think it's going to be a lot of fun."

Before finalising the flight with the Phoenix, the Breakers did not have a confirmed date to fly out but had expected to be going any time from late October to early November. The opportunity to fly in through New South Wales with the Phoenix before heading down to Melbourne not only cut travel costs for both teams, but means the Breakers will not need to quarantine on arrival into Melbourne as, from November 1, there will be quarantine-free travel between New South Wales and Melbourne.

With a little more certainty to their plans this time around, the Breakers will have a larger travel party as a number of family members of the players and staff will make the trip, while returning swingman Rasmus Bach, import point guard Jeremiah Martin and assistant coach James Reid are already in Australia and will link up with the team early next week.

"We're going to have a big travel party, but it's going to be great for these guys to have that support," Walsh said of family members flying over with them.

"We've got a great group of guys this year; such a hard-working group that when I made the announcement and told them they had to be ready on Monday, the resounding response was 'let's get to work'."

With a confirmed travel plan, the team can now turn their full attention to their preparations for their four pre-season games against the Sydney Kings, Illawarra Hawks, Melbourne United and South-East Melbourne Phoenix beginning on November 13.

With several new faces in the team this year, including bright young French stars Ousmane Dieng and Hugo Besson, and no returning imports, Walsh said he hoped to see progress in the team's cohesion through the pre-season – with their first regular-season match on December 4 away against Cairns.

"It's a very interesting group of guys that we have. We were able to bring back our core group in guys like Tom [Abercrombie] and Finn [Delaney], we've added Yanni Wetzell who has been absolutely amazing, and we've got these two young guys who I feel very confident this time next year will both be playing in the NBA.

"I feel pretty confident saying this is by far the best roster we've had; by far the most complete roster – when you look at our locals, our imports and we have, essentially, two Next Stars – so it's pretty exciting."