Hoops

Wildcats vs 36ers, Oct 11

Was shocked when I stopped seeing Johnson's number out there (had to do it by eye, stupid score board was ridiculously wrong about who was on court at any given time).

As he was murdering us rather casually all game, I'd have thought Wright would have told him to stay out there the whole time!

An entertaining game, wait til we see them at full strength.
L.Schenscher and B.Anthony had good games, but
D.Johnson made 28points,then subbed out tooo long, didn't get anymore.

It's the same every season, and has been forever.
The crowd (in Perth at least) always takes a game or two to get into it, just like the general game night presentation always takes a game or two to smooth out.
I'm tipping that things will be better this week, even if the crowd maybe isn't as big.

Lol with Nathan!

Yeah the people to my right at the games renewed but the young fellas to my left didn't but 2 of the 3 made it to every game last season except the grand final as it was too expansive (ill never understand that)

I just hope that like last season everyone was a bit 'wait and see' and the longer the season goes the more we find our voice, but the court announcer has a job and hopefully he does it better against the Kings.

It felt weird as I lost my voice at half time in the grand final yet against Adelaide barely anyone around me clapped or yelled and I still had voice come games end!

@Mystro,

At least we got the consolation that your mob were deprived of seeing them win it in person, so, you know, pros/cons.

haha but they looked ok last night vs the sixers

Wish you'd cut the rings down with them!

that made the 3rd championship so much sweeter than the rest, cutting down your new nets in your new gym.

@Proud,

I hate to suggest it, but I think losing the GF like that on home court took the wind out of a lot of supporter's sails and we might be paying for that failure for quite some time to come. No problem with a Breakers championship, but having it happen in front of 13k Perth supporters in game 2 was a worst-case scenario for the NBL - much better to have gotten a third set of ticket takings, ratings, and a much better crowd reaction with a third game Breakers win.

Wildcats definitely with a different coaching philosophy than last year with Lisch the only player above 30 minutes a game and we had what 4 players play over 30 minutes and Redhage 36.

Interesting small ball out there with Redhage, Hire and 3 guards (Burdon, Dollar and Martin) up against the two 7 footers!

The crowd was very tame except for the last minute when it got very loud and the whole behind the scenes felt disorganized with few cheerleader performances and not even a single wildcat roar... It just felt like everyone was out of practice cheering the team on compared to how loud we were during the finals series last season.

I was impressed with the game but still some missed lay ups (mainly by Redhage and Dollar) so hopefully the rims aren't to blame for that.

Thanks for the game Adelaide, BRING IT violet crumbles

^ I really thought we were getting murdered on the boards, just seeing Adelaide bigs pull in rebound after rebound.

Guess that's more of a function of the rebound disparity I was accustomed to last year....

Pretty good game IMO for Round 1 of the season.

For the Cats, we haven't gelled yet but I like the combination of skills sets we have on the roster. Should be a good season if Ennis doesn't exercise his out clause.

Adelaide look like they could be scary good once they have their full team on the floor.

Great to have the NBL back again :)

Adelaide can bring there b team and still have a chance. They love coming to perth! Few soft calls in the post and perth, i think did well on d. Had a state player playing his 1st game against dj and the ranga in front of 10 thousand + no knight all in all got the win and with a new look team they will only get better. Winning a close game can do wonders.

Also, as a tip for anyone making an away trip to Perth, Shafto Lane for post game munchies!

@Wildcat Fan,

In their online report, Wildcats listed 10,700 as the crowd.

Probably affected by a few factors - Wellington Rd redevelopments would have had a knock-on effect to the cancellation of train services along most of the major lines. Combined with a 6:30pm start time. Hopefully we converted some walk-ups to members, they were running the offer to count your ticket cost against your membership cost, which is good.

Isn't it funny how your impression of a game whilst its going on can really differ from the actual stats? I was whinging through the whole game that we were getting destroyed on the rebounds, particularly offensively, with all of the Adelaide bigs. And yet somehow we had more rebounds, even offensively?

Thought Adelaide looked great, were playing out of their skins. We really had no counter to Johnson, he just did as he willed. Ervin and him were great to watch, in those brief moments when I could be objective about the whole thing.

Happy with the win, great games from Ennis, Beal, Jervis, Wagstaff and Hire. Redhage was poor, although very, very clutch, and loved the little cameo from U'u, did some good work. Beal seems to just be in need of about 5% more polish, a little restraint, maturity and confidence and he will absolutely explode, showed some great potential to do much more. Redhage, well, his pre-season was great, not sure why he struggled so much today but I'm sure its transitory.

Too early to make comparisons with the New Zealand-Wollongong game, Adelaide was a far stronger prospect, even wounded as they were, than Wollongong. Honestly, I think the 36ers will be the biggest thorn in Perth's side this year, they seem perfectly built to take us apart, especially without Knight. We'd have lost that game if it had been at Adelaide Arena!

Btw, did anyone else notice Ch 10 coming up with insane maths in their stats? I swear I saw one of their stats say 2-6 from 3 was 26% instead of 33% and various other bad calcs.

Can't say Perth didn't deserve to win its, though it could have gone either way.

DJ could dominate this league if he can keep it together. Just starting to come into his prime as a big man. Offensively, if he plays within himself, he is basically unstoppable with his height and speed. The proof though whether he has taken it to the next level will be three quarters the way through the season if he doesn't drop his head when things start getting tough.

Agree with the sentiment. An impressive loss, if such a thing exists. Both teams can play A LOT better, just a question of who improves the most over the year.

I like the new hands off rules, but would like to see a bit more physicality in the rebounding stakes. A player comes over the top - call it. Otherwise, let them jostle for best position. Way too many 'offensive' rebounding fouls called.

Classic Redhage - crap shooting all game and then he makes a tough shot that looked like it was about to get blocked! Tough for the Sixers from there, because if there's one thing they don't do well its make threes!

Ervin some poor decisions down the stretch. Not sure what instructions Joey gave the team, but there was no attempt to setup a post up for DJ or even BJ Anthony. Ervin needed to recognise that against the Wildcats, getting the ball inside to our big men is a better option to start the offence.

Good game though. Both teams looked very good despite missing key players. From a Sixers point of view it was just great to see our team playing with confidence and purpose.

Really liked what BJ Anthony showed tonight. He needs to cut down his fouls, but he adds much needed rebounding and toughness and is quicker on his feet than I thought.

Joey has the sixers playing great ball. Loving the high-low!

I agree there's been a few soft calls in the paint, but otherwise a good game to watch so far.

Great plays from Ennis and Ervin on either end, some nice shooting from DJ and a great spin move from Beal too.

I thought it was interesting that Joey started BJ. I actually think the Sixers looked good early with that extra size, but BJ got into foul trouble and so they've had to go away from it.

Once the Sixers had to go a bit smaller I thought the Cats came back into it, controlling the boards and getting a lot of easy open looks from kick outs, which the Sixers defenders couldn't recover to.

No audio on my nbl.tv feed.

Awesome.

Bloody oath, the ASAPIndex predictor says Wildcats by 23 - definitely too weighted by last years results. Got within 3pts of the NZ-Woll result though...

Really hope we can do it tonight, and in style. If the Wildcats get this right, the buzz will get those memberships back over 8,000 and we'll have no sub 10k games again this year.