Hawks need point guard

By Tim Keeble
Updated November 5 2012 - 9:56pm, first published August 13 2009 - 11:49am
Mat Campbell
Mat Campbell

They have represented Australia and played almost 900 NBL games between them.Tonight Wollongong Hawks linchpins Glen Saville and Mat Campbell will add another string to their bows when they man the point guard position against US college team Vanderbilt in Sydney.Campbell has been a shooting guard throughout his long career with the Hawks, while two-time Olympian Saville is more accustomed to a small forward role.But the Hawks are yet to sign a starting point guard and back-up playmaker Rhys Martin will be lining up with the Rockhampton Rockets in this weekend's Queensland Basketball League semi-finals.Former Illawarra junior star Zac Delaney will be on the bench for the Hawks tonight and is a capable playmaker.But Delaney is light on experience and is unlikely to be thrown in at the deep end against a quality college outfit such as Vanderbilt.Hawks coach Gordie McLeod will essentially rely on Saville and Campbell to split time at point guard and is also keen to call on some of his tall timber to shoulder the ball-carrying duties."We're going to use the situation to bring some of the other guys into that spot," McLeod said."I saw Vanderbilt play against the AIS and they're a good side. They're very aggressive and apply a lot of pressure."It's going to be tough for us, but we'll use Matty and Sav a bit at that position to bring the ball up and we'll keep it simple. The other thing we can always do is get the bigs to be involved in our offence, and it'll be good for us to do that because a lot of the (NBL) teams like to get aggressive with the point guards and our bigs will just have to carry it and get us into our offence."Zac will be with us and he'll probably get some minutes at some stage we hope, but we'll just see what happens with that situation."Martin had a strong game in Monday night's 19-point defeat of US college team St Marys, dishing out nine assists."It would've been great to have Rhys with us for the whole week, but the good thing is we've got everyone else," McLeod said."He was very good on Monday. He showed some real positive signs. He operated well off the on-ball (screen) and he was comfortable at that level against that opposition. It steps up another level when you get to the NBL, but the signs were certainly good."McLeod said the Hawks were gradually narrowing down their search for an American point guard."We're down the track with that. We're working on a couple of guys we're pretty keen on," he said."It's just a lot of reference checks and talking to different people and looking at the whole package. It's an uncertain thing and there's always a risk factor, so you try and cover as many bases as you can."We have a list and they're coming in all the time. We've been talking to about five guys ... Hopefully we can have something in place real soon."

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