Penney foresees bright future
Kirk Penney doesn’t read the tea leaves with the same accuracy he knocks down open jumpers, but he’s pretty sure the omens are favourable for a Breakers outfit who finished an agonising one spot off a place in the ANBL playoffs.
In fact, Penney, anointed club MVP at Thursday night’s annual awards dinner, couldn’t help but be struck by a feeling of deja vu as he signed off on his return season to New Zealand with rather bittersweet emotions.
‘‘The first couple of days [after missing the playoffs] we were all a bit hungover with the result, just feeling awful about it,’’ said the 36-year-old shooting guard who has played 138 games and scored a record 3000-plus points for the club.
‘‘But the theme tonight is a good one: it is about growth and some great things happened this year, we had some great memories and some awesome wins in those last eight games.
‘‘It is a little bittersweet, but I think we just want to focus on the sweet stuff.
‘‘There’s a lot of excitement for next year and the club is in a great spot in terms of personnel. There are some really good young Kiwis coming through and I’m excited for them. Hopefully my minutes get less and less because they’re playing really well.’’
It’s a long bow, but Penney admitted to feeling much as he did at the end of the 2009-10 season when the Breakers similarly missed a playoff spot by one game after Kevin Braswell came in as a late-season replacement and keyed a five-game win streak to finish the season.
The next year (2010-11) the Breakers won their first championship, and Penney draws a parallel with this group, keyed by Kevin Dillard’s late arrival, who won six of their last eight and also came within a whisker of an unlikely playoff push.
‘‘What was so bittersweet about that was I felt like we had the team to win it, and I also felt going into the playoffs this year we actually had a team that could win it,’’ he reflected.
‘‘Adding [Kevin] Dillard helped a lot, and with Finn [ Delany] coming on that last game you were ‘oh man, what’s going to happen in the playoffs if he can play like that?’ And Shea [Ili] too.
‘‘We went through so many speed bumps and at times we weren’t a great team because we were all over the place. But by the end we were back to being a great team and I just hope we can take that into next year because unfortunately we can’t take it into the playoffs.’’
The Breakers have six strong pieces already in place for next year, and Penney said it was an exciting prospect to think about what Delany and Ili could achieve alongside the veteran core of himself, Tom Abercrombie, Mika Vukona and Alex Pledger. Rob Loe is unsigned, but a probable returnee too.