The Year the Breakers Cut Dylan Boucher

The Year the Breakers Cut Dylan Boucher

Dylan Boucher has won four championships with the New Zealand Breakers. These days he's President of Basketball Operations at the same club. Said like that, it sounds tidy. Local kid does good, ends up running the place.

It wasn't tidy. Early in his career, the Breakers let him go.

"I felt like I'd done enough to earn a contract," he told us on the podcast. "The one team I wanna play for doesn't want me." By his own account, he was close to walking away from the game altogether.

He didn't. He went to Perth, then Brisbane, won a championship over there, and came back better than the player they'd cut. Three years after they let him go, they brought him home.

Most people would leave the story there — guy gets cut, guy comes back, roll credits. We were more interested in what he was actually doing in the three years in between.

Backing your own work

His answer wasn't the usual "believe in yourself" line.

"You back that you've done the work for this to come out the other side," he said. "It doesn't just happen — you don't just wake up the next day and go, I'm out of it. You have to actively put in the work to get out of it."

Worth sitting with that for a second, because it's not really about confidence. It's about whether you've actually earned the right to expect things to turn. If you've done the work, a slump is just bad timing. If you haven't, it's something closer to wishful thinking dressed up as resilience.

Most of us running a business through a flat patch could stand to ask ourselves the same thing. Not "do I still believe in this," but "have I actually done what turning this around would require." Different question. Usually a more honest one.

The cost of being busy instead of available

The line that stuck with me most wasn't about his playing days. It was about his first year in a leadership role.

"I was working really hard, but I was always out of the office and always have my door closed," he said. "The staff don't know where you are. They just think you could be out for lunch for three hours. They don't know you've done three commercial meetings back to back and you've come back worn out... they haven't been able to talk to you for two days because they haven't seen you."

He wasn't coasting. He was flat out — meetings, calls, agents ringing him at all hours from the other side of the world. From where he sat, the calendar was full. From where his staff sat, he'd vanished.

It's an easy trap, and the harder you work the easier it is to fall into, because you're measuring yourself by output and your team is measuring you by whether they can find you. Both are reasonable ways to keep score. They just don't add up to the same answer.

"There's leadership and work ethic," he said, "but you've also got to be a human as well. You've got to be available to people."

Saying no, and what it costs you either way

As a player, Boucher said yes to nearly everything — school visits, charity events, community appearances. "It's probably how it's landed me in the roles that I'm in now," he told us. The generosity built the network that eventually carried him into the job he has today.

But that same habit has started working against him. "Unfortunately, I have to say no to some things now, and it's things that normally I would have said yes to. People do struggle to understand that, especially if you've done it previously."

He wasn't framing it as a regret, and it isn't one. It's just true that what you can afford to say yes to changes as your role changes — and the hard part isn't figuring out the right answer for where you're at now. It's that the people around you are still expecting the old answer.

Standards without fear

We asked how leaders hold a high standard without people resenting them for it. His answer had no theory in it at all.

"If you're not willing to do it yourself, you can't be expecting others to do it. People see you do it, and then realise — okay, well, he's willing to do it, so I should be willing to do it."

That's it. Not a framework, not a workshop. He was just as blunt about the alternative — the values poster on the wall nobody actually lives by: "You write all these values that we want to be known for, and then the next day you're in the office not living those values, and everyone's going, well, those values on the wall, we're not even doing them. So what's the use in having them?"

The line that did the most work

Asked what got him through being cut by his own club, Boucher gave us this: "You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take."

It's been said by a lot of people who never had to back it up. He did. He went to Perth for less money, with no guarantee it would lead anywhere, because not finding out felt worse than failing.

That's really the whole thing. Not "believe in yourself" — believe in the work you've actually done, take the shot anyway, and don't disappear on the people around you while you're doing it.

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Dylan Boucher is President of Basketball Operations at the New Zealand Breakers. Hear the full conversation on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.