Basketball: Hawks pair on Tall Blacks tour ahead of the World Cup

Hyrum Harris after returning to the Hawke’s Bay Hawks in 2021. Now a fixture in the team he’s also a Tall Blacks national representative on tour in Japan this week and aiming for a place in the 12 for the World Cup, starting on August 25. Photo / NZME

Hawke’s Bay Hawks basketballers Jordan Ngatai and Hyrum Harris have made the cut for a 14-man Tall Blacks squad pre-World Cup tour with matches in three countries, starting in Japan on Wednesday.

They had been among 18 players at an intensive four-day training camp in Auckland last week, and two more are set to be jettisoned ahead of the World Cup in Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines on August 25-September 10.

Absent from the squad is Hawks star Ethan Rusbatch, who missed the training camp through injury.

Ngatai, 30, came to the Hawks from Wellington Saints this year and, having first represented New Zealand in 2013, was in the Tall Blacks team at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Australian Gold Coast and the 2019 World Cup in China.

But 27-year-old Harris is targeting his first World Cup after making his Tall Blacks debut last year. From Auckland, he has been an integral part of the Hawks’ make-up since 2021, having made his New Zealand NBL debut for Super City Rangers in home-town Auckland in 2015 and having one other season with the Hawks, in 2018.

The pre-Cup tour involves a pair of matches against the Japan national side on Wednesday and Friday, and, via a training camp in Turkey, will next play Canada and either China or Germany in the FIBA SuperCup starting in Germany on August 12.

The squad the plays China and Italy in the first Fiba Solidarity Cup in China, ahead of the Tall Blacks’ opening World Cup game against USA in the Philippines on August 27.