Perth Wildcats coach Rob Beveridge was happy with what came out of the Lakeside All Stars pre-season series and now is looking forward to the full team being available for the Friendship Games.
The Wildcats had a good hit out with the Lakeside All Stars in a three-game series a couple of weeks ago against a team that included NBA forward Anthony Tolliver and a host of other talented players.
That was a good series to get some cobwebs out of the system and now this weekend the Beijing Ducks, Shanghai Sharks and Sydney Kings come to town to take part in the Friendship Games on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night at the WA Basketball Centre.
Beveridge is delighted with the preparation his championship team has had coming into the 2010/11 campaign.
"I am happy with the preparation, particularly from a physical perspective, because we have been going since May lifting weights and the guys are in terrific shape physically," Beveridge said.
"That has given us a great platform so our practices are at a higher level than they were last year because the players are fitter, stronger, sharper and more athletic. It's been the off-season work that they've done that has led to that, so it's really good."
The Wildcats get to go up against two of the strongest Chinese teams and then the NBL-returning Sydney Kings this weekend and Beveridge is looking forward to seeing how his club is shaping up for the championship defence in the upcoming season.
"With this series obviously we are trying to build a relationship with China and that's going to be good for us long-term to get in there in terms of sponsorships and building a bigger base. It will definitely be good to play another NBL team as well to see how we compare against them," he said.
"Beijing and Shanghai played in the recent tournament that the New Zealand team ended up winning where Melbourne played as well. The Chinese teams were beaten quite easily by New Zealand and Melbourne, but they didn’t have any imports at all.
"Those imports should be playing here, though, and how good they will be will be determined by the determination of their national players who were at the worlds and then their imports. If they are all available they will be a lot better."
The Wildcats' pre-season work begun months ago with the players doing some hard physical work, then some playing in the SBL or other similar competitions and on-court work as a team began last month.
Beveridge is happy with how it's all gone and is now looking forward to a steady block of games leading into the season.
"We had a real long block of physical work and then we started training and it was a good evaluation for us to play some games. We'll now have another two-week block and this will be another evaluation process to see how we are going with that," Beveridge said.
"Winning or losing is irrelevant, it's about assessing if what we've put in place is working and then after that we'll have another week and-a-half before we play the tournament Darwin. All of it is a measuring stick in these games and there will be a little bit of cat and mouse going on, and we'll try different things to see if it works or not. That's what these games are all about."
The Wildcats are currently in the middle of a hard training run that won't be backed off just because there are matches over the weekend and Beveridge wants to see how his team copes with the fatigue that will result from that.
"It's an eight-day block where we will be training and we will train on game-day as well because I want our players to train under fatigue. That's another thing because we want to put our players under adversity so they get used to handling tougher situations," he said.
"We will go pretty hard leading into those games and might play under fatigue where we might make more errors, but we want to see how our players handle that. Damo gets back this weekend and the intention will be to play our full team."
Looking back on the series with the Lakeside All Stars, Beveridge was impressed with what he saw from the team that he did put out on the court and it should create some more depth and versatility given Cameron Tovey, Brad Robbins, Damian Martin and Kevin Lisch either took little or no part.
"The thing that was great out of that because we didn’t have Damo, Robbo and Lisch got hurt was that we had to play people in different positions. Cameron Tovey was playing the guard role and then when he got hurt we pretty much had no guards and there was an emphasis on the bigs to carry the ball and do a lot more," he said.
"We were playing against very good players so from a one-on-one perspective it was a great challenge, and from a team point of view we had the wood on them because we are a team and they were a bunch of individuals put together in a short period of time.
"The good thing was that it showed our versatility, mobility, how our players can handle adversity and that was the most pleasing aspect. Winning the games was completely irrelevant, but just to see what we can do by moving players around was good."
