Rebuilding the New Zealand Breakers: A New Era Begins
At Atlas Place, the New Zealand Breakers don’t just look different. They feel different.
New logo. New uniforms. New coach. New court, courtesy of Steven Adams. A refurbished headquarters humming with fresh paint and fresh ideas. And, crucially, the return of an academy that once funneled some of the country’s best young talent into the professional game.
This is Matt Walsh’s Breakers, rebuilt from the studs up.
Rebuilding the foundation
For the first season under the current ownership, not much changed. Then Walsh went to work.
He poured money into modernising the club’s base at Atlas Place, added a new court and upgraded facilities to NBL-leading standards. Around that, he reshaped the front office and coaching staff, and turned over the roster while keeping a core he believes can contend.
The rebrand is not cosmetic. Walsh talks constantly about connection and community, about a club that looks and sounds like New Zealand.
“Our rebrand represents New Zealand and our heritage, the people and the land,” he told the Herald. When he bought the team, he felt everything had to be restarted – the culture, the standards, the way the club interacted with its fanbase. The first move was bringing in Dillon Boucher, a figure woven through the Breakers’ history, to reconnect with the ethos that once made the franchise the NBL’s model of success.
Step by step, the pieces arrived: staff off the court, talent on it, all charged with restoring a club that once hung four championship banners in the space of five years.
“We put a lot of work into rebuilding everything here,” Walsh said. “We had a new team, new coach, and it’s the start of a great season.”
The Breakers remain the lone New Zealand representative in the Australian-based NBL, and Walsh is adamant they should feel unmistakably Kiwi. He always viewed the reset as a two-year project: get the right people into the right roles, then build an infrastructure that can sustain winning rather than chase a single hot season.
He believes that stage is complete. Now the test moves to the floor.
A new era on the sideline
On Sunday, Spark Arena hosts the home opener against the Illawarra Hawks. For all the off-court change, this is where judgment really starts.
The Breakers have kept a strong spine. Parker Jackson-Cartwright returns to run the team. Sam Mennenga, one of the success stories of the old academy, is back as a key local. Around them, Walsh has added proven NBL winners in Kouat Noi and Dejan Vasiljevic, plus international size and versatility in Charles Bediako and Josiah-Jordan James.
Bediako offers rim protection the Breakers have craved. James, a defensive wing who can shoot, will miss the start of the campaign with a hamstring injury, but is expected to be a central piece once fit.
The headline change stands on the sideline.
Gordon Herbert, fresh from leading Germany to the 2023 FIBA World Cup title, is now the man with the whiteboard. His résumé stretches across Europe’s top leagues and includes a stint as an assistant with the Toronto Raptors. Very few coaches in the NBL can put a world championship ring on the table.
“No one thought we could bring him to New Zealand, but we were able to do it,” Walsh said. “He’s excited to be here.”
Herbert is backed by a staff that blends local knowledge and international experience: New Zealanders Matt Lacey, Quinn Clinton and Josiah Maama, plus lead assistant Sebastian Gleim, who previously coached the Franklin Bulls in the New Zealand NBL.
It’s a coaching group that mirrors Walsh’s wider ambition. The Breakers are no longer just fishing in the local pond. They are selling a global project, one he believes now attracts players who might previously have brushed past New Zealand on the map.
“We brought in a lot of players who I think in years past might not have taken a hard look at coming to the Breakers,” Walsh said. He sees a brand that travels, a club “well represented around the world” and determined to be competitive at home.
Written off, again
Across the Tasman, the reception has been colder.
Many pundits have already pushed the Breakers toward the bottom of their pre-season ladders, pointing to one statistic: they are the only team in the league without a player with NBA experience.
Walsh shrugs that off as a quirk, not a flaw.
“All of our guys are NBA level, played in the G League, played at high levels around the world, so it’s not necessarily a prerequisite,” he said. The NBL has long featured players with NBA credentials, including at the Breakers, but Walsh is adamant the badge alone doesn’t win games.
For him, the story is fit. He believes the club has found the right mix around its locals and that the league itself is in a “great place”. Being the lone New Zealand flag in that competition is, in his words, an honour.
Eyes on expansion, and Asia
The NBL is openly exploring expansion. The Gold Coast and Canberra have been floated as potential new homes, as has a renewed push into Asia. League rules around arena size – 8000 to 12,000 seats – make a second New Zealand team unlikely without significant venue upgrades, but Walsh is not closing that door forever.
For now, he sees the league focused on broadening its footprint globally. Asia sits front and centre in that conversation. He expects the Breakers to play more pre-season games there and wants to use those opportunities to grow the club’s presence beyond Australasia.
The ambition is layered: win now, build for later, and sell New Zealand basketball to the world.
The academy returns
That future focus explains one of the most significant moves of the off-season: the return of the Breakers academy after a six-year hiatus.
The first intake is modest in number but big in intent – 20 male athletes from school years 11-13, drawn from six Auckland high schools. The programme has pedigree. In the past, it helped uncover players such as Mennenga, Reuben Te Rangi and Anzac Rissetto, all now back at the club.
Walsh wants the academy to serve the entire country. It is not just a conveyor belt for the Breakers, though that is the dream for some of the teenagers who will walk through the doors. It is a pathway – to college scholarships, to professional careers, to the broader life experiences that sport can open up.
“The academy is really important because it is for the entire country to highlight the best young players,” he said. “One day we want them to be Breakers, but they’re not all going to be Breakers.” The key, in his view, is giving them a route to keep playing at a high level and to use the game “for all the positive things that it can bring.”
That philosophy runs through almost every topic Walsh touches when he talks about the club.
From Showtime to Spark Arena
Scepticism remains in some corners. Walsh was part of the previous ownership group, and not everyone has forgotten that era. He leans heavily on continuity with the Breakers’ most respected figures to answer those doubts.
Dillon Boucher is back. Paul and Liz Blackwell, who oversaw the club’s golden years, remain close. Walsh insists they will always be part of the Breakers’ fabric “as long as I’m part of this”. For him, it is about history and “doing things the right way”.
His personal ties to New Zealand are deep. His wife, Jessica, is a Kiwi. The family has lived here, including an 18-month stretch during Covid when the borders were closed. Walsh has been visiting the country for more than two decades.
His sporting education came in a very different setting: Los Angeles in the 1980s, during the Lakers’ Showtime era under legendary owner Jerry Buss, with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lighting up the Forum. Walsh, still a Lakers season-ticket holder, saw first-hand what a successful team can mean to a community. He wants the Breakers to play a similar role in New Zealand, on a different scale but with the same emotional pull.
That passion for sport has taken him beyond basketball. In 2023, he fronted a bid to bring an A-League football team to Auckland, only to lose out to a group led by Bill Foley, Ali Williams and Anna Mowbray. He has since joined the ownership group at EFL Championship club Swansea City, alongside names such as Martha Stewart, Luka Modric and Calvin Cordozar Broadus jnr – Snoop Dogg.
Swansea’s squad includes All Whites World Cup players Elijah Just and Marko Stamenic, giving Walsh another link back to New Zealand. As of Friday morning, the club sat second in the Championship table.
He has met Snoop Dogg before, though not yet in this new context. That will come. In July, he spent time in Swansea with his family, meeting coaches, front office staff and players, and came away impressed with the direction of the club.
“Sports in general to me is a passion,” he said. “They approached me to be involved, and I was happy to join the team.”
Golf, growth and the fifth banner
Walsh hints at further moves into New Zealand sport. One project already locked in is the Breakers’ first Celebrity Golf Invitational, planned for January. The response has been strong, he says, and the idea is simple: use golf to showcase the country, bring international names to New Zealand and funnel the attention – and resources – back into basketball development.
Strip away the side ventures, and the target remains clear. The Breakers want a fifth NBL championship, to sit alongside the four they captured in the 2010s. They were the first New Zealand team to win a title in an Australian sporting competition. That history looms large over everything Walsh has done.
“Last year, we were off to a good start, we won the pre-season tournament, we won the in-season tournament, but that’s not why you play,” he said. “Those are steps along the way. The ultimate goal is to get to a championship, so we’re trying to do everything in our power to allow our guys to do that.”
He talks about taking best practices from around the world, then “putting a little Kiwi dust on them” and bringing them home.
On Sunday, under the lights at Spark Arena, that dust gets its first real test. The banners already hang above the court. The question now is whether this version of the Breakers can earn the right to raise another.
