Hoops

Impact of Gleeson?

They've already got two doubles out of the way, they have two more in the weekends following the bye, then they have one in 2014, week 16.

Thankfully we don't have the completely skewiff schedule we had last year with the Perth Arena construction delays.

NZB @ Vector, Cairns, Wollongong in that period between 6 Dec and 10 Jan, so it will be an important stretch. NZB are strong at home but doubly so at Vector, Cairns still want to assert a claim to title contention. Wollongong, well, if we knock them off in 10 days time, we'll be confident of knocking them off this time around.

I'd expect a minimum of one win through that patch, but all three is not out of the question. My guess would be that, barring injury concerns here or elsewhere, we'd pick up Cairns and Hawks, but lose to the Breakers for a 2-1 result.

Thankfully playing a clump of road games early and the two week break between Rnds 10 and 11 help reduce the impact of Perth Arena's availability.

^ They also seem to be doing a good job in terms of indoctrination of the newcomers ;)

Greg Hire is awesome and anyone who says otherwise can jump off whatever the most iconic bridge in their city is.

No, I'm not Greg Hire in disguise.

When Knight comes back the only weak links in the bench will be Burden and U'u, and I still have hopes for those of those two.

^ "Dollar" Beal.

Start well every year? We've never started this well in the history of the club. Last year by this stage we'd already been on the receiving end of a 30+ pt thrashing.

Quirkily enough, at the hands of the side we just handed a 40pt one to, but anyway.

He has an unbelievably talented starting group (even without Knight..With Knight, it is plain scary).

Their roster covers a lot of bases - defence, outside shooter, rebounding, scoring

He is a good coach. You can't not say that to a guy who is 6-0.

But, the real challenges lie ahead. Look back on their season thus far:

-2 wins over the Kings and 1 over the Hawks (2 teams who just aren't legitimate contenders)
- Beat a 36er team that was under-strength (without Frye and Gibson)
- Beat a Breakers team that still had Lazare and were pretty average on their night.
- Only beat the Tigers by 4 points, with the game close all the way through

Still give Gleeson a lot of credit though. He helped Beal get into a scoring rhythm (after starting the season with scores of 11,10 and 2).

Also, I think the style of play that Gleeson has implemented (Fast, uptempo) is getting the maximum potential out of Ennis. He is still a bit raw and unrefined, but the way the Wildcats play makes him look a bit more polished.

When are people going to lay off Gleeson? He did a pretty good job in Townsville for several years which everybody seems to forget. All everybody seems to want to focus on is the ONE bad season he had with Melbourne. Seamus McPeake went off the rails with his antics but everybody seems to forget that and just blame Gleeson. Sure, he didn't have a good year and made his own share of mistake but come on people, let it go. Perth are sitting atop the NBL ladder, undefeated. To not give Gleeson a shred of credit is just petty, teams don't just magically coach themselves.