Just 48 hours after their best performance of the Australian NBL season, the struggling New Zealand Breakers pitched in with their worst against the same opponents in Cairns.
The Kiwi club, on Monday night at the Cairns Pop-Up Arena, managed to undo much of the ground gained by Saturday’s meritorious 85-79 victory over the home-town Taipans with a dispiriting 84-69 defeat to the same Snakes.
The loss drops the Breakers into an early 1-3 hole, with a tough Friday night visit to the Sydney Kings up next ahead of the looming Melbourne bubble, while the Taipans snap a 6-game losing skid and improve to 2-6 for the season.
It was a sloppy and disjointed effort all-round from the Breakers as they struggled in all aspects of the game, but most pointedly in shooting the basketball.
It is very difficult to win at this level when you miss as many 3-point shots as the Kiwi club did on a night when they might well have struggled to hit water from the pier.
They went 4 of 29 from distance at a shocking 13 per cent clip.
But not much went right for the Breakers on an untidy evening.
They shot just 37 per cent from the floor overall (25 of 67), gave up 14 offensive rebounds and failed to break 20 points in all four quarters.
They did close a 20-point deficit to single-digits late in the piece, but even that had somewhat of a half-hearted look about it.
