The New Zealand Breakers will open their NBL season on Sunday with a player who was not on the roster at the start of the week, after a torn hamstring wiped out one of their new imports and sent the club hunting for cover with only days to spare.
The Breakers confirmed on Thursday that they had signed Tall Black and former NBA draft pick Mojave King as an injury replacement for American guard Josiah-Jordan James, who is out for several weeks. The 24-year-old walks straight into a side that tips off against the Illawarra Hawks at Spark Arena on Sunday at 5pm New Zealand time.
James, a 198cm guard signed in July from Israeli Premier League club Hapoel Jerusalem, went down in the opening minutes of the Breakers’ pre-season win over Melbourne United last week. Scans confirmed a torn left hamstring. The club has not put a date on his return and says he will be reassessed four to six weeks into his rehabilitation, which leaves open the possibility he misses a sizeable chunk of the opening stretch.
“Our first thoughts are with him; no player wants to be injured but this is especially the case when you have travelled so far to a new club and playing in a new league,” Breakers president of basketball Dillon Boucher told RNZ on Wednesday. Boucher said a “tremendously disappointed” James was already working with the club’s medical and performance staff on his rehab.
The replacement arrived within 24 hours. Boucher said the timing made the signing harder than it looked from the outside, because every club in the league had long since locked in its roster.
“Our priority was to move quickly and bring in a replacement for what is a busy opening stretch to the season. But speed alone in that decision is not enough, the challenge is to bring a high-quality player, someone who will complement and strengthen the group on and off the floor, and that is not easy so close to the start of the season,” Boucher said.
“We are certainly ticking those boxes with Mo, he is a quality player and proven performer at NBL level, he is athletic, shoots the ball at a high clip and can guard multiple positions.”
Boucher went further, calling the deal “something of a coup” given King had offers from Europe and elsewhere. “The bonus for us is he is a Kiwi, he has played for the club before, knows the culture, the environment, and is familiar with many of the guys on the roster, which is great, because he will need to hit the ground running.”
King has one of the more unusual résumés in New Zealand basketball. He came through the NBA Global Academy in Canberra, signed with Cairns at 17 as part of the NBL’s Next Stars programme, spent his final Next Stars year in Adelaide, and was taken at pick 47 in the 2023 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Lakers, only the third New Zealand-born man ever drafted. He was traded to the Indiana Pacers, played in the G League and NBA Summer League, then came back across the Tasman to the Breakers for the 2024/25 season before a second stint with Cairns last year.
The urgency is easy to read off the fixture list. The Breakers play three games in the opening six days, starting with Illawarra on Sunday, then Brisbane at Pat Rafter Arena on Tuesday and Perth at RAC Arena the following Saturday, according to the NBL’s opening-week schedule. A side down a rotation guard heading into that run would have been in trouble.
It is not the start the club wanted for a season that has been built up as a reset. Gordon Herbert, a World Cup winning coach, took over on a two-year deal after Petteri Koponen parted ways with the Breakers in February, and pre-season began in August at the club’s North Shore base under new black and white branding. Half the roster returned from last season, with Dejan Vasiljevic arriving from the Adelaide 36ers and Kouat Noi from the Sydney Kings.
Herbert was blunt in August about the job in front of him. “To a certain extent it’s like a puzzle and putting it together, sometimes the little pieces are tougher to fit into the puzzle than the big pieces,” he told RNZ. He also pointed at the money pulling players out of the region. “With Japan and Asian leagues, with the money, there’s a lot of competition to keep your best players here. That’s probably the dynamic that we have to work with and against.”
That is the wider context for a club that finished seventh in a 10-team league last season while operating inside the salary cap, at a time when the top five finishers all went over it and paid luxury tax. The cap rose about 7 percent for this season to just under AUD 2.2 million, with a minimum roster spend of AUD 1.95 million.
Import guard Parker Jackson-Cartwright, back for a fourth season and one of the best-paid players in the league, said in August that this group felt different. “I think this is the most exciting team I’ve been a part of as a Breaker. Just heading into a season, everybody seems to be on the right page and even day one, we have good vibes, we have good energy the culture is moving in the right place.”
Jackson-Cartwright, who has stayed longer than most imports and is working through the process of becoming a New Zealand citizen, also framed the opening weeks as the whole ball game. “You can make or break your season in one stretch and I think that starts at the beginning.”
The Breakers have not won an NBL championship since 2015. Sunday’s game tips off at 5pm at Spark Arena and screens on ESPN, carried in New Zealand through Sky.
Will Mojave King’s late arrival be enough to steady the Breakers through a brutal opening week, or has the injury to Josiah-Jordan James already cost them ground they cannot make up? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply