WE'VE suffered a few losses this season but it's fair to say none have been more disappointing than our game against Perth on Sunday.
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The only one that really comes close is our first loss to South East Melbourne prior the NBL Cup, and it's for similar reasons. We got out-hustled.
Both came down to effort areas and they're two games where we let ourselves down and didn't meet our own standards when it comes to those non-negotiables.
Sunday's game was more disappointing because we've been together a lot longer as a group and we should be on an upward trajectory and that's not what's happening at the moment.
We just didn't play hard enough for the whole game, it's that simple. That's something we really have to look at as a group because out coaching staff, led by Goorj, have done a great job preparing us for all our games.
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Our game plan was solid, we succeeded in taking the ball out of Bryce Cotton's hands early in the game.
I think most teams go into any game against Perth with that plan and we limited his touches early on, but we just let too many of their other guys get easy looks.
They're shots most guys are capable of making at this level and you're not going to win many games in this league with the game of basketball we put forward.
There is not a single team in the NBL that doesn't have things to work on through a season. We're certainly in that boat but, what's most frustrating at the moment, is that we're falling down in areas we'd made our trademark earlier in the season.
We are still that team and Goorj took some steps to remind us of that this week. He was obviously pretty frank in his comments after the game but it was nothing he hasn't said to us.
We did a pretty thorough review of the Perth game, but he also took us back through some games from earlier in the season when we were playing well.
It's a quality teaching method and it stops us getting too down in the dumps or dwelling on a poor performance long enough that it feeds into your next one.
We've got two games this week that are important for our season. We've never discussed the NBL Cup and where we stand on that ladder.
I honestly couldn't tell you where we sit on it. We haven't looked at winning quarters and bonus points or anything like that.
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Our focus through this has always been on getting wins that contribute to our regular season and making sure we don't drop a bunch of games here that could hurt us down the track.
Coming into these last two games we've put ourselves into a bit of a hole and we need to win these two over the weekend so that this Cup period doesn't put us behind everyone else come the home stretch of the season.
It's no secret this month has been a grind, but it's not something you point at to justify bad performances. We do know there's a run of games to come at home, but we have a singular focus on this weekend.
We've got Sydney on Thursday and no one who knows anything about this league needs to be told about our rivalry and how big these games are.
The Kings are playing really well at the moment. We're going to have to limit Casper Ware and Dejan Vasiljevic's looks so it'll be a pretty similar game plan to Perth.
We play Melbourne United after that on Saturday. They've got a few different people on deck to when we played them last time but, if we play at the level we had previously, we'll be right there with them.