KEY POINTS:
The New Zealand Breakers' brief stint atop the Australian National Basketball League (ANBL) ladder ended with a 94-111 away loss to Wollongong Hawks.
The Hawks led throughout at the Wollongong Entertainment Centre to inflict the Breakers' fifth defeat of the season as the visitors slipped back to second behind Melbourne's South Dragons on win percentage.
The Breakers get a chance to make amends tonight with another tricky away match against Sydney Spirit.
Guard Kirk Penney again led the way for the Breakers with 30 points but the visitors weren't at their best, coming off a two-week break and without their injured star point guard CJ Bruton.
They threatened to make a comeback when an Oscar Forman three-pointer saw the deficit narrowed to 75-79 late in the third quarter, but the Hawks scored eight unanswered points to take a 12-point buffer into the final period.
For the eighth-placed Hawks, who kept their playoff hopes alive, Kavossy Franklin led the way with 26 points and Matt Campbell scored 18.
In the battle of the big men, the Hawks' Dusty Rychart was a key figure with 16 points and 13 rebounds while the Breakers' Rick Rickert scored 15 points and grabbed 12 rebounds.
The Breakers had won seven of their eight away matches in the ANBL this season and crossed the Tasman with a narrow competition lead over the Dragons with 15 wins from 19 matches.
At the teams' previous meeting in Auckland in round one, Penney's 41-point haul led home a comfortable 114-93 win.
But Wollongong was always a tough venue for the Breakers who'd won just once from seven previous visits.
On Friday night the Hawks never gave the Breakers a sniff, leading 37-29 at the first break and 66-54 at halftime as they out-rebounded the visitors in the first half and scored a flurry of second-chance points.
Overall the Breakers shot just 41 percent from the field, against the Hawks' 49 percent, while it was just 11 from 31 from the three-point line for the visitors.
- NZPA
