Basketball: Breakers earn ugly win

Cedric Jackson paced the Breakers on offence. Photo / Getty

Breakers 71
Hawks 55

If the mark of a championship side is to grind out unconvincing victories, the Breakers must certainly be considered title contenders.

The Kiwi club tonight played some of their worst basketball all season but eventually emerged on top against the cellar-dwelling Hawks.

Welcoming to Vector Arena a Wollongong side that had suffered eight straight defeats, the Breakers did their utmost to throw away what for the first half appeared a certain win.

A horror third quarter caused almost irreparable damage before the Breakers bounced back to get over the line. If the opposition were anyone other than competition's last-placed team, the home side might have been less lucky.

But in advancing their record to 7-3, the Breakers remained at the right end of the ladder, able to take the win and mercifully banish this one to memory.

No one within the club will want to look back on the third. The Breakers held a 10-point lead at halftime but emerged from the break to promptly miss 12 straight shots, eventually finishing with three points in quarter that would have been kind to call ugly.

Dean Vickerman looked on helplessly as shot after shot rimmed out, happy with the offensive game plan but hurting at the results.

"We scored 22 pretty much every other quarter," he said. "And I thought we kept attacking and stayed in that mindset.

"A lot of those shots, I was really happy with, we were just missing them and we couldn't get the offensive rebounds."

His team got their act together for the fourth and, after inspiring the troops at the final break, Cedric Jackson quickly ended the game as a contest.

"Ced came in and said, 'let's just go have some fun'," Vickerman said. "That changed people's mindsets a little bit, we came out a little bit looser and made some shots."

Jackson scored 13 points in the final period to finish with a game-high 22, chipping in seven rebounds and four assists. Ekene Ibekwe was the only other Breaker in double figures and, for a club that often puts five or six players past that mark, that fact illustrated just how inaccurate the offence was for much of the game.

Like they did last weekend, the import pair both made major contributions as the Breakers began well. Ibekwe took little more than a minute to announce his arrival on the floor, throwing down an alley-oop from Rhys Carter and looking lethal around the rim.

Wollongong remained within a possession but the Breakers soon found a significant advantage in the second, with a number of eye-catching lay-ups from Jackson helping his side lead by 10 at the major break.

But it all went wrong to start the third, with the Hawks enjoying an 8-0 run as the Breakers took more than six minutes to make a field goal. That streak of futility was finally broken by Ibekwe but Wollongong still managed to draw level late in the period.

The Breakers needed to quickly arrest the worrying slide in the fourth and Jackson took it upon himself to accomplish just that, making a pair of triples to give his side the breathing room they wouldn't squander.

Breakers 71 (Jackson 24, Ibekwe 11, Carter 9)
Hawks 55 (Davidson 12, Ervin 10, Hill 8)
HT: 44-34