Basketball: Penney injury a blow for Breakers

Back pain means Kirk Penney will miss tonight's game. Photo / Kenny Rodger

All of a sudden things don't look quite so rosy at the Breakers.

Back-to-back losses on their first road trip to Australia was one thing, the sight of league MVP Kirk Penney hobbling across the carpark at the club's Mairangi Bay training facility when he should have been helping repair the team's floundering offence another.

Penney suffered lower back pain early in yesterday's training session and withdrew as a precaution. But later in the day he was scratched from tonight's game against the Melbourne Tigers, with club officials left nervously awaiting the result of scans.

A best-case scenario would see the league's most potent scorer back in action for the trip to play the Wollongong Hawks in 10 days. The worst case scenario is a disk flare-up, with an expected lay-off period of two to three weeks.

Back injuries, however, are notoriously fickle, something the Breakers are only too aware of. Centre Rick Rickert was expected to miss just a match in his debut season but ended up requiring season-ending disk surgery.

A similar prognosis for Penney would be a major blow for a club installed as pre-season title favourites. But while that sort of doom-mongering may be premature, the parallels with last season, when an injury to point guard CJ Bruton sparked an extended losing streak, are too stark to ignore.

The Tigers have injury problems of their own, with Nathan Croswell (toe) joining star forward Chris Anstey on the sidelines. But having defeated the Breakers 86-81 eight days ago, they will fancy their chances.

It wasn't as if the Breakers didn't already have enough problems. They were smashed on the boards and struggled defensively in the defeat to the Tigers and then turned in an awful offensive display to go down to the 36ers in Adelaide on Saturday night.

"We are struggling to make the adjustments we need to put together a 40-minute game," veteran forward Tony Ronaldson said.

"We have fallen into our comfort zone a wee bit. I don't think anyone is arrogant enough to think that we are going to win the whole thing but I think that everyone is pretty comfortable with the team that we have got.

"But you can't lack that intensity and desire. It was fine [in the first round victory] against Cairns, it was there, but on the road it has got to be there for 40 minutes and it wasn't."

Penney's absence should certainly blow away any lingering complacency.

If there is one positive, the team were already working on taking some of the pressure off Penney by creating more opportunities in the paint.

"We can't just rely on one thing, one avenue to the basket," Ronaldson said.