It's often with the best of intentions, but simply putting up a good fight is not what were about. It's just one of the things I expect of our group.

For plenty of others out there, it's all they expect of us. That's not our mentality, and it can't be if we want to feature in the post-season.

When it comes to professional sport, you're not in it for participation ribbons. You have to ask yourself, do you want a pat on the head, or do you want to play in the playoffs?

When you comeback from 22 points down to give yourself a chance like we did on Monday, of course you're proud of the effort – but it's not what helps you win the next game.

What we need to cast a critical eye over is why we've started so poorly in three of our five games. We were good enough to overcome it against Brisbane, we got blown out by Perth and it was glaringly obvious against Melbourne.

The adversity Melbourne were facing was well-publicised. They were missing Chris Goulding and they'd gone to double-overtime in Perth 48 hours earlier.

The question we need to look at is why, under those circumstances, could Casper Ware be ready to go when we weren't?

It wasn't fatigue – we battled much tougher circumstances to win in Cairns – it was about mindset. That's the difference.

Cameron Gliddon did the same when we played Brisbane. He came out on a mission and hit five threes. They're on the road, we're at home and we just weren't ready to go.

You can't play 20-25 minute games and that's what we're doing at the moment. 

A lot of our guys have been professionals for a long time and have developed their own pre-game rituals.

We all have our idiosyncrasies, sports people more than most. Some of our guys get in their own zone listening to music, some do video, some like to shoot around.

They're grown men and professionals. As a coach you have to be very wary of tinkering with those things, but something certainly needs to change in our mentality. 

We've shown glimpses in all those games of being legitimate championship contenders and glimpses of being legitimate wooden spooners. It's very frustrating when I know how good this team is.

This week against Sydney we haven't got another game 48 hours later to worry about. There's simply no excuses for us not being ready to go.

The Kings have got legitimate superstars, the likes of Jerome Randle, Kevin Lisch, Brad Newley and of course Andrew Bogut.

Throw in Daniel Kickert and David Wear in there they're a very deep team. If you give a team with that talent a leg-up, you're in big trouble.