Saints Look To Avoid Sweep
Tagged in: Competitions, NBL
As if Tuesday night’s game one of the Dominion Finance NBL Finals was not enough of a nightmare, Century City Wellington Saints coach Doug Marty has had to relive it the rest of the week.
“I tell you the game didn’t get any better watching it over and over,” said Marty, referring to the 95-78 loss to the Waikato Pistons in Te Awamutu that now sees the Saints needing to win game two at home on Friday night to force a deciding game three in the Capital on Sunday night.
“It was actually worse than watching it the first time, the live action.”
Marty, the NBL Coach of the Year, has been going over the game one footage the last two days, figuring how it went so wrong and what adjustments the Saints can make to avoid a two-game sweep.
Top of his list is the defensive end, where Wellington was picked apart by American guard duo Jason Crowe and Brian Wethers, then pounded into submission by a constant diet of Pero Cameron and Ben Hill in the third and fourth quarters.
“They beat us down low and Crowe and Wethers beat us with their speed and penetration. We really have to step up our defence all the way around, in every aspect . . . but I think we can do it.
“I thought we got some quite good open looks than I did at the time. We just didn’t hit our shots and we’ve got to do that. We never really had any rhythm or got any traction at either end. We missed a lot of open shots on Tuesday.”
The Saints, second in three-point shooting during the regular season, shot 28 percent outside the arc and their field goal percentage was also down in game one, while the Pistons shot 54 percent from the floor.
And for the first time this season, the Saints have major injuries concerns.
Marty rated American forward Ernest Scott a 30 percent chance to play on Thursday afternoon with an ankle injury, while American centre Kevin Owens would play but not at full-strength and Tall Black Brendon Polyblank was slowly recovering from flu-like symptoms.
Waikato have no major injury concerns, with Brian Wethers’ back injury that bothered him the last quarter of the regular season now manageable.
Crowe was named League MVP on Wednesday, while he and Wethers were named to the NBL All-Star Five, along with Scott and Saints centre Nick Horvath.
Pistons forward Mike Homik, who needs just five points to amass 1000 points in the NBL in his eighth season and 132nd game, will be a key figure, along with Cameron, in defending the Saints bigs, Horvath, who went for a game-high 37 points in game one, and Owens, who has produced his best performances this season in the Capital.
In the 18 previous best-of-three playoffs series in National Basketball League history, only four have gone three games, with the higher ranked team winning all four - one of those happening in the Finals when the Auckland Stars lost the first to the Nelson Giants before returning home to take two straight in 1996.
The Pistons will look to become the first lower ranked team to close out a series sweep on the road in NBL Finals history and become the first team to walk away from Queen’s Wharf with a victory in 2008.
Boosting the Saints is their return to the TSB Bank Arena, where they have posted an undefeated 10-0 season to date.
“It helps us tremendously,” Marty said. “It will be familiar being back home, in front of our fans, but we’ve still got to play better basketball. The dimensions don’t change. We know there’s a huge challenge in front of us but we’re still confident.
“We just have to execute our stuff on both ends, but just make minor changes. Our business on Friday is to get it to Sunday.”
And not to live through another nightmare.
