Wollongong Hawks coach Gordie McLeod has no intention of putting players on notice over the season’s final stretch.
Most of the players will become free agents at the end of the season and changes to the team roster are more probable than possible.
Full coverage of the Hawks The Hawks are out of finals reckoning with seven games to play and take on the Gold Coast Blaze twice this weekend.
McLeod rejected suggestions he would challenge players to start auditioning for next season.
‘‘If you’re having to say that to get anyone to go, you’ve got the wrong people,’’ the 2009-10 NBL Coach of the Year said.
‘‘It’s about how you go about your business. It’s about what you’ve done from day one and what you do to the last day of the season. That’s what you evaluate on. You don’t turn around and go ‘oh we’re looking at you now’, because that evaluation has been done right from day one at the start of this year.
‘‘We do sit down with the players and we talk about different things - them individually and the team as a whole - and we’ll do that again. We’ve already met a couple of times this year and we’ll meet again in March and explain the whole system and where we’re at and so on.
‘‘It’s a little bit different this year with the free agents list because it’s coming out later, so there’s a whole lot of issues and there’s a process we’ll go through.
‘‘But in my experience it’s not about telling someone ‘we’re looking at you for next year’. You look at the people who are coming out here [at training] wanting to get better day in, day out.
‘‘These guys are adults. Everyone needs to be driven and everyone at times might need the poker, but you want people that are self-driven.’’
After retaining nine players from last season, the Hawks expected to figure in the hunt for a finals berth.
But they failed to fire too often and next season’s squad will almost certainly look different.
‘‘There’s usually changes in any team, and those changes can be brought on for a number of reasons,’’ McLeod said.
‘‘If you look at where we’ve been as a club [since 2009-10], after year one we made a decision to sign a core nucleus of that group. Now we have to sit down as a club and look at how we go to the next phase.
‘‘There are a few guys that have options for next year, but that option’s either way. When we sit down with them when the season finishes, they might say ‘thanks very much but I’m moving somewhere else’ or we might say to them ‘we’ve evaluated the situation and we feel we need to go this way’.
‘‘It’s no different to other people having a plan for a number of years and then setting somewhere else where you need to go.’’
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