Taipans 85
Breakers 81
We play on. A heart-stopping double-overtime victory by the Taipans in Cairns last night sent the ANBL finals series to a third and final game.
If the Breakers are to deliver this country's first Australian club sports title they will have to do so on their home court on Friday night.
Last night, they came within a fraction of a second of putting the series to bed.
It took a buzzer-beating three-pointer from American Ron Dorsey to stop them. Dorsey's remarkable shot had to be checked to confirm it beat the buzzer.
It did, sending the match a CJ Bruton and Kevin Braswell act had seemingly claimed for the Breakers to a second overtime period.
When Mika Vukona fouled out at the start of the extra period, the writing was on the wall for the Breakers. Cairns had all the momentum and rode it home to keep the series alive.
Earlier, a Bruton three on the buzzer for regulation time had kept the Breakers alive in a match that took an age to get going but then proved a classic for the ages once it did.
Back-to-back threes by Braswell looked to have sealed the title for the Breakers but Dorsey wasn't to be denied.
With 10.1 seconds of the first overtime period remaining, he drilled a three to cut a four-point lead to one.
Two Kirk Penney free throws stretched the margin back out to three, leaving Dorsey just 5.8 seconds to take the ball from an inbound and get it through the hoop at the other end. He needed every second but got the job done, sending the orange-clad crowd of 5200 into raptures.
Braswell almost repeated his heroics late in the second overtime period but his three-point attempt with 20 seconds remaining rolled around the hoop and lipped out.
That shot would have put the Breakers up by one. Instead, they were forced to foul, and the outstanding Ayinde Ubaka finished them off with a pair of nerveless free throws.
Game three it is then. Better not order those championship rings just yet. Particularly not if the Breakers shoot the ball the way they did in the opening four quarters.
With the Breakers coming out cold, the Taipans eased to an early 7-0 lead. The Breakers slowly came back into it, but they owed their first lead of the match, 12-11 with 1.21 remaining in the quarter, as much to Taipans' errors as any positive play of their own.
A combative but low-quality first quarter ended with the Taipans two points to the good, with both sides shooting a lowly 5/19 from the field.
That barely improved in the second quarter, and the Taipans took a 33-30 lead into halftime.
If there was a positive for the Breakers, it was that their shooting couldn't get much worse, while big guns Penney and Gary Wilkinson had barely fired a shot.
Thomas Abercrombie carried what little Breakers first-half offence there was with nine points, while Penney and Wilkinson had six apiece.
The three-point shooting was particularly poor, with Braswell landing the Breakers' only success from nine attempts of the half with 2.45 remaining.
The Taipans fared a little better, converting three of their 13 attempts.
Things didn't start any better for the Breakers in the second half.
Penney, Wilkinson and Bruton set the tone with missed three point attempts, while all up the team missed their first six field goal attempts.
Cairns fared no better and when Bruton finally broke the sequence with a mid-range jumper and Vukona followed up with a lay-up, the Breakers were briefly back in front.
A 6-0 Taipans run put paid to that and the quarter then see-sawed before Abercrombie drilled a three to lock up the scores at 45-45 just before the buzzer. It wouldn't be the last such shot of the night.
Lemanis flushes defeat down loo
The Breakers will borrow All Black assistant coach Steve Hansen's proverbial dunny as they look to rebound from last night's agonising game-two double-overtime loss in Cairns.
"We have to basically flush this one down the toilet and get ready for [game three on] Friday," coach Andrej Lemanis said. "That is the only thing that matters now."
Having had the title snatched from their grasp by a Ron Dorsey buzzer-beater, the Breakers could be forgiven for being downcast. But they weren't, insisted Lemanis.
"Whilst it hurts to lose in that fashion, this is good fun. This is why you are in hoops."
Veteran point guard Paul Henare backed up that sunny view on the team's loss.
"There was obvious disappointment at not getting the job done over here but we have got to forget about this game and move on," Henare said.
CJ Bruton, who drilled a three-point shot at the end of regulation time to send the game into overtime, had led the locker-room efforts to repair spirits, Henare said.
"CJ spoke about 'this is why we finished first during the season, this is why we put all the hard work in, so we give ourselves an opportunity to have another crack at it back home'. You know, it hurts, but we have got another game on Friday and that is what we look forward to now."
Henare gave credit to Taipans forward Dorsey, whose two threes under huge pressure ripped the game - and for now the title - away from the Breakers. "That second one he made was a hell of a shot," he said.
The Breakers are now down to their last strike but Lemanis didn't believe they would be under any more pressure in Friday's decisive game.
For Henare, last night's result meant a stay of execution on a retirement that had been less than a second away.
