"Attending that game was one of the hardest things we made Corey do," reflects Breakers general manager Richard Clarke. "We wanted him to see what he was missing out on."
Let's be clear - Corey Webster is not a cheat and he's not a bad person.
"I would love to not have to do this," claims Clarke. "I've known Corey for six years - he was 15 when he first came in here.
"I would rather have not had to sit here and see how emotional he was. It was hard for us and hard for him."
You could definitely make a case that Webster is a slow learner and clearly needs to take a very close look at his lifestyle. Having already tested positive once, he needed to be extra careful about what he put into his body ... and he wasn't.
Maybe he thought it couldn't happen to him again.
"I was out with a bunch of friends and didn't really know what was in the cigarette," Webster told Radio Sport this week. "I had asked them if it was cannabis - obviously I didn't want to fail another drug test.
"After that, I felt a little bit stoned, so I asked them what was in it and they said it had some legal stuff. I didn't really think much about it." It's irrelevant that he may have accidentally smoked a synthetic version of cannabis that's legal. There are plenty of legal substances on the Wada banned list, including every-day cold remedies, that are out of bounds to high performance athletes.
From the Breakers' perspective, their decision to drop him was based on a betrayal of trust. After his first transgression, they had assigned veteran Dillon Boucher as a 'minder' to take the youngster under his wing, and keep him on the straight and narrow.
"That had been going really well," says Clarke. "They were meeting every month to talk about goals and what Corey wanted to do off the court.
"Dillon was pretty disappointed when he didn't come to him for advice. That's a bit to do with Corey's personality - he was a bit embarrassed and didn't really know what to do."
That the test result came the day the Breakers won a must-win playoff game in Perth, the most important game of their history at the time, showed Webster had let everyone down at a key time.
"We're not writing him off," says Clarke. "We've made our training facilities available and we still see him as part of our family.
"But now he needs to do it without a safety net. That didn't work last time - he needed a good shake-up."
Webster holds out some hope that he can find another professional league overseas that isn't bound by drug-testing regulations, but if that happens, you get the feeling he'll have missed the point again.
Hopefully, his downfall resonates with his young brother Tai, a winner with the New Zealand team at the inaugural Fiba 3x3 World Youth Championship in Italy. That would be some good out of the saga.
