WE'RE 2-0, but we're still at the bottom of a very steep hill. That's our mentality after winning our first two games.
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It's great to pick up a couple of wins on the road, but it's only a start, in this season probably more than any other. We're still facing a whole lot more games on the road ahead of the NBL Cup in Melbourne.
The unique circumstances of this season mean you can't drop a few on the road and then get back on your home floor to turn the ship around. Winning games on the road is tough in this league and we have to keep banking them because we don't have a choice.
If you drop a bunch, you can end up in a hole pretty quickly and having our backs to the wall in that sense really played into our first two games. We know we're going to have a home stretch at some point that we'll be able to take advantage of but, for the moment, we need to keep facing up to what's thrown at us.
I fee we've handled it tremendously so far, but it's a long season. We've still got a lot of games on the road to come and I daresay we've lost that element of surprise we might have carried into the opening round.
If anyone told us we'd be 2-0, we'd obviously have taken it, but the standards you hold yourself to are the most important. In that regard, we weren't happy with how we played in the first game against Brisbane.
We came out a bit tentatively and didn't really play to the level any of us expected. We got going as the game went on and did enough to win, but it's not the way we want to play.
I said to the guys after that game, 'all right, we've worked out some kinks, let's go out there and show what we can really do'. We definitely did that against Cairns and really showed people the potential we have.
We played the type of basketball we know we can play. We locked down on defence and played the type of basketball Goorj has been preaching. I also feel we were a bit more prepared for the Taipans.
With the initial draw, we were looking at playing them twice in the first round so we'd done fair bit of prepping for them. With the changes to the draw, we ended up playing in Brisbane and we're heading back there pretty quickly for Thursday's game.
It'll be our third game in six days so we'll need to dig deep, but I was really impressed with how strong we finished on Monday night. Cam Bairstow went down in the warm-up and we knew Deng Adel was going to be out.
It put us under the pump numbers-wise but, with such a young group, the travel and two games in three days just didn't affect us the way it did them. I thought Cairns looked a bit weary but our young guys were out and ready to play.
Obviously the third game in the week is going to be rough with a bit of travel in there as well, but I don't think it's going to be the grind it was in the past with groups were that were that bit older. Goorj has spoken about that and how three quick games can play in our favour if our mentality's right.
We had two of our marquee guys out but I've said all along that the biggest thing that excites about this roster is depth. It's the most talented group I've been a part of, but it's the way it runs top to bottom that really gives me confidence in what we can do.
We've got so many weapons and I don't think it's going to be a case of one guy needing to get 20 points a night for us to win. Justinian Jessup didn't have a great game first up, but on Monday night he went out and shot the lights out.
Playing our third game in six days is going to be tough, we're going to need the week off afterwards to get out legs back under us, but we're fully focused on going out there on Thursday and keep this thing rolling.
