Basketball: Record Breakers - Nail-biting finish

Breakers veterans Mika Vukona and Tom Abercrombie are ecstatic after the win. Photo / Jason Dorday

Title-winning buzzer beater gives NZ side their fourth championship title.

Dean Vickerman said before the playoffs that he believed the Breakers were a team for big moments.

Game tied, 1.2 seconds on the clock, the NBL basketball championship on the line - moments don't come much bigger than what the Breakers faced yesterday afternoon.

The players soon vindicated Vickerman's belief and Ekene Ibekwe drained a title-winning buzzer beater to edge Cairns and claim the Australian NBL title, but that moment was just the latest in a long line of successes for this outstanding organisation.

A record that now includes four championships in the last five seasons speaks for itself - the Breakers join Perth (six), Melbourne and Adelaide (both four) as the only teams in Australian NBL history to own four rings. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of that fourth title, though, was what it followed.

There were no big moments last season, just 17 defeats and a second-bottom finish. But the Breakers never panicked, never considered departing from the plan that made them the premier club side in New Zealand sport.

Loyalty was not just displayed but expanded. Vickerman was handed even greater control in his second year as a head coach, allowed to forge a new identity for his team after inheriting one from Andrej Lemanis. And the results were spectacular.

"I'm just extremely proud of the club and Deano," said assistant coach Paul Henare.

"He backed himself and trusted himself about what he wanted his team to look like, he spoke about it early on in the pre-season and backed himself the whole way.

"I think he's done an amazing job in turning this thing around from one year to the next. I couldn't be happier for him."

Vickerman almost always wears a smile - even during the difficult previous season - so it was no surprise to find him beaming in a near-empty locker room after the game, sharing a quiet beer with Henare after escaping all the excitement on the court.

For the first time he acknowledged a wariness about the uneven way the Breakers finished the regular season but, performing a pretty good impression of the guard who brought about the club's first championship, Vickerman said he should have known better.

"We had a clip the other day with some ex-players and [Kevin Braswell] talked about how, 'we just cruise through the regular season but this is winning time - this is Breakers time'. It's nice that those guys who have been in this group - and now Corey [Webster], Tom [Abercrombie], Alex [Pledger] and Mika [Vukona] - are just going to be known as winners and big-game players. It's a nice little tag they can carry around."

Vickerman, having been Lemanis' right-hand man for three seasons, now boasts the tag of a four-time champ. But the Breakers are never going to stand still and admire their success, especially now they have pulled within two titles of rivals Perth on the all-time honour roll.

Becoming the most successful club in the history of the competition? Now that would be a big moment.