Basketball: Added edge as Breakers meet old foes

Daryl Corletto during Game One of the Basketball Grand Final for New Zealand Breakers against the Perth Wild Cats in 2013. Photo / Greg Bowker

The best rivalry in Australasian basketball will tonight resume at Vector Arena after a year-long hiatus.

The New Zealand Breakers and the Perth Wildcats have shared the past five championships and at the moment they share the top two spots on the ANBL ladder.

The pair's past battles have been acrimonious on occasion but any aggravation was absent during the previous campaign, when Perth handed the Breakers four straight defeats as the Kiwi club slipped to a second-bottom finish.

But the competitive edge to the rivalry has returned, with the Breakers ruining the Wildcats' home opener in round one before both teams set about establishing themselves at the head of the standings.

So with the Breakers (9-4) now back in the upper echelon, and with Perth (9-3) one place ahead of them, Dean Vickerman has been preparing his players for the fight of old against their familiar foes.

"You've got to prepare for the battle, prepare for the fight with Perth, and I think the boys have shown they're ready to be up for the intensity of this game," Vickerman said. "You never want to be surprised by the pressure that they're putting on you, and I thought we did a good job of simulating that through the week."

A big part of that pressure arrives at the offensive glass, a category in which players from the Breakers (Mika Vukona, Ekene Ibekwe) and Perth (Matthew Knight, Deandre Daniels) occupy four of the top six spots in the competition.

Allowing offensive rebounds saw the Breakers struggle in last weekend's loss to Sydney but Vickerman backed his players to repeat their performance from round one, when Perth were restricted to just seven boards at that end of the floor.

"If we rebounded like we did last week, we'd be in some trouble," he said. "They're a team that crashes the offensive boards and they have a lot of people who do that well.

"But our activity levels last time we played them were off the charts and that's the thing that we've been showing going into this one - the desperation and having each other's backs. If we can do that we'll be in a good place."

The Breakers are well-placed health-wise, with Tom Abercrombie fully fit and Alex Pledger meeting expectations. The centre will be set for about 10 minutes a game for the foreseeable future, an undesirable prospect but one that at least allows him to again experience the mutual antagonism can mark meetings between these sides.

"Last year I guess the rivalry probably wasn't spoken about as much as it was in previous years," Pledger said. "But we got a pretty handy win over them the night their (championship) banner was raised, so there's definitely still a bit of rivalry."