He’s played for three NBA teams, in France, Germany and Lithuania, but Derrick Walton Jr has not experienced camaraderie like the Sydney Kings since his college days.
And as he prepares to farewell Xavier Cooks, he’s given his NBA-bound Kings’ teammate a piece of advice – forging a career in the NBA means remaining adaptable on court.
When 2021-22 NBL MVP Jaylen Adams left the Kings at the end of last season, Sydney had the unenviable task of finding an import of a similar calibre who was able to deliver on plans for back-to-back titles.
They found one in point guard Walton, whose stellar first season finished with a strong performance in the game that sealed the second title of Chase Buford’s tenure.
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After the 77-69 defeat of the New Zealand Breakers at Qudos Bank Arena on Wednesday, Walton was named the MVP of one of the most hotly-contested championship series in league history.
The Sydney Kings with the Dr John Raschke trophy after winning game five of the NBL Grand Final series. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
Players who stand out in the NBL as much as Walton typically attract interest from wealthy European franchises or even the NBA, so the American is hesitant to commit to returning to the Kings next season.
And there has been speculation suggesting coach Chase Buford will also be heading back to the US.
Reflecting on his first NBL campaign after Wednesday night’s victory, he had high praise for the franchise that lured him to Australia.
“The best thing I can say about this is that I haven’t really been on a team that’s got as much camaraderie since probably around college,” he said.
“This is one of the groups that I feel like I finally got a chance to let my hair down and kind of be back at home in a college setting and just kind of be within a locker room and not really have a lot of distractions.
“I don’t think you understand how hard it is to win a championship at the professional level, so you take every single situation and chance you get and hone it, because who’s to say you’ll ever get the chance again.”
Walton was the only member of the Kings’ roster this season with NBA experience and said teammate Xavier Cooks, bound for the Washington Wizards in a matter of days, had it in him to succeed in that league.
But the guard gave Cooks some parting advice, too. “The more you can adapt, the longer you can survive,” he said.
“I think he’s got a lot of stuff, the intangibles, that you can’t really teach. Some of the stuff he does on a nightly basis are some of the things people struggle with. For the most part, he’s a very high IQ guy, I think he’ll figure it out.”
Buford won’t call it a dynasty yet, but the Sydney Kings delivered a second straight crown in front of the largest NBL crowd in history – 18,124.
Cooks had his best game of the series to help the Kings fight back from 12 points down in the first half and seal victory with an 18-3 run late.
The victory confirms back-to-back titles for the Kings, who were the NBL’s most consistent team this season despite significant roster changes in the off-season.
“Last year was kind of a crescendo towards the end, this was a grind, this whole year,” Buford said.
“We started the year pretty well and then we had a little lull towards the end and I was wondering if we were ever going to find ourselves again.
“Three games out of the five-game series, these guys found a way to drag us across the line.”
Despite the trophy, Buford was hesitant to declare the Kings were in the midst of an NBL dynasty. “We’re in the middle of a back-to-back, that’s what I’m worried about tonight,” Buford said.
The win put paid to a Breakers fairytale – New Zealand spent the whole of last season on the road due to COVID-19 and finished bottom of the ladder – as they were denied the chance to write the final chapter in their rag-to-riches story under rookie coach Mody Maor.
“This hurts deeply,” Maor said. “I really felt that this team could have done it, crossed the line.
“We didn’t play well enough in the last quarter in order to do that.”
The Breakers were quicker to come out of the blocks, leading by as many as 11 points in the first quarter and doing well to muscle the Kings out of the paint and force them into low-percentage shots.
An Angus Glover triple towards the end of the second quarter gave the Kings the lift they needed and began one of the great performances of the night – Glover played through an apparent rib injury to finish with 12 points and nine rebounds.
“He’s always been a team-first guy,” Walton said.
Kept quiet in game four, Cooks (19 points, 11 rebounds) made his last game before joining the NBA’s Washington Wizards one to remember and began to work his way into the contest in the second period. He charged through the paint to beat the buzzer and cut the margin to only one point at half-time.
A jump shot from Walton (team-high 21 points, six assists) gave the Kings their first lead since early in the first quarter but New Zealand imports Barry Brown Jr. (22 points) and Jarrell Brantley (16 points, four rebounds) kept them from running away.
The scores were tied at 56 at the final change and as tensions rose, players appealed to the referees after a water bottle was thrown from the crowd onto the court.
New Zealand captain Tom Abercrombie fouled out with three minutes and the Kings went on a 14-point scoring run as Cooks tightened his grip on his opposite man Brantley.
A Walton jump shot in the final minute put the margin at six, forcing a Breakers timeout before the Kings enjoyed a thrilling victory.
After his side lost the decisive game of the NBL championship series, New Zealand Breakers CEO Matt Walsh made a point to stay for the entirety of the Sydney Kings’ on-court celebrations, and to not look away.
“One, because I think it’s the right thing to do, and two because I wanted to feel every single moment of it,” Walsh said on Wednesday night.
“Because I don’t want to feel that again.”
In their first full season back at home since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Zealand surged from the bottom of the ladder and into the championship series under rookie coach Mody Maor.
Once there, they threw the gauntlet down, first by winning game one in front of a hostile Sydney crowd and then by forcing a fifth game with a gutsy victory in Auckland last Sunday.
But at Qudos Bank Arena, the Breakers’ fairytale season was cut short by a fast-finishing Kings side, who claimed a 3-2 series win with their 77-69 victory.
The Breakers made the Kings defy history to clinch their second-straight title – since 1997, only once before had the team that lost game one of the NBL play-off series gone on to hoist the trophy.
The rags-to-riches story ended cruelly, but the Breakers won’t be afraid to read and re-read the final chapter in the off-season, hoping that will inspire them to go one better next year.
“We’re not going to run away from how much this hurts,” Maor said. “We’re going to use this as fuel to come back better next season.”
The Breakers will use the coming days and weeks not just to dwell on the defeat but to consider what was achieved in their first campaign back home.
The team’s highlights for the season included breaking the record for largest basketball crowd in New Zealand history (9742), registering their best win-loss record since 2014-15 and recruiting three of the most effective imports in the competition.
Above all, Walsh and Maor hoped they had moulded the Breakers into the team they spent the best part of five years envisioning. “We wanted this team to play in a way, to conduct itself in a way that our fanbase, Kiwis, feel proud of,” Maor said.
“Over the last month, there were a few instances when it was really clear that we achieved that goal. I’m very proud of it, now it’s on us to do it again.”
Walsh, who led the ownership group that bought the Breakers in 2018, also used the defeat as an opportunity to take stock. “When I first bought the team, I went to a Melbourne United vs. New Zealand Breakers game two elimination game. I don’t know how many people were at Spark (Arena) but it wasn’t 9730,” he said.
“We wanted to build a team that resonated with New Zealand fans, after being gone for two years. It wasn’t just all of a sudden it happened, we’ve been working on this for five years. We’re going to work all off-season, the work starts as soon as we get back on the playing roster and how we can connect with our community and fans better. We’re in no way finished. We’ll be back.”
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