by Nick Gibson

Well that’s another basketball season done and dusted and unfortunately the Taipans fell one game short.

There were always question marks on whether they were going to be able to score enough in Game 3 to be competitive and from the outset it never looked pretty.

Gun imports Ubaka and Dorsey chose a bad night to have an off shooting night and combined for just 4 shots of 26 attempts. You’ll never win games of basketball  shooting the ball at that clip.

On the bright side though they had a great year and gave us all something to cheer about. Coach Fearne is straight back to work now trying to retain the nucleus of the playing group and if successful in 12 months time maybe this proud club can go one better!

Congratulations to Andrey Lemanis and his Breakers squad – they had a tremendous year and fully deserve this success. Andrey said that it has taken him five years to get this and it just shows how hard these things are to win.

Don’t forget they nearly got bundled out by Perth and played the game of their lives (Kirk Penney 38 points) to get back in it. It was a great season all round and Larry Sengstock should be proud of the job he’s doing to make basketball significant again.

This week's winners:

• NZ Breakers (Four rings now to the great CJ Bruton)
• Cairns Taipans (great year and oh so close)
• Essendon (biggest quarter time lead ever!)
• Trev Gleeson (new Melbourne Tigers coach) 
• Memphis Grizzlies (Someone forgot to tell them that the eighth seed is not supposed to beat the no. 1 seed!)
• Miami Heat (here they come!)

This week's losers:

• San Antonio Spurs (having the best record means little come play off time)
• Gold Coast Suns (I know they are building and full of kids but 94 – 1 @ quarter time, WTF!)
• Corey Homicide Williams (The appointment of Gleeson means no contract for Homicide – he knows you to well!)