Fightback can’t hide Phoenix cracks, coach warns

Dash Daniels, Yannis Morin and D’Shawn Schwartz gave Josh King what he wants from his South East Melbourne Phoenix players. 

He doesn’t think he’s asking too much of the rest: to play with energy, toughness and pride, and to fight and compete.

Everything was in place for the Phoenix to keep their momentum going on Sunday at John Cain Arena.

They had won their past two games by a combined 46 points and had eight days to prepare to host a Tasmania JackJumpers side that had played a gruelling game in Launceston on Friday night and lost two more key players to injury in the process.

But from the outset, King saw a team that didn’t play together well enough, showed poor body language and simply didn’t give the effort he expects.

The Phoenix fought back from a 22-point deficit to give themselves a chance, but that only papered over the cracks. 

Afterwards, King lamented where his 4-6 group sits almost a third of the way into NBL27.

“We have guys who have been winners and know how to win, but I wouldn’t say we are 100 per cent together right now,” King said.

“When we are, we’re really good and we can be really good. 

“Hopefully that’s my job to get us there at some point quickly so that we can be the best version of ourselves.”

There were individual positives. Daniels was +16 in his 23 minutes, Morin was strong with 13 points, four rebounds, three steals and three blocks, and Schwartz had his best game with 27 points on 10/16 shooting.

But King wants a strong team performance, not one that relies on individuals carrying too much of the load.

“At half-time, I told them that I didn’t like their body language, that was the biggest thing, and I didn’t like our look and our energy on the bench,” he said.

“I thought everybody was making mistakes and told them not to look at the scoreboard and to play the way we’re supposed to play.

“That’s the toughest part as a coach, you can’t really make adjustments when you’re not doing the things you’re supposed to be doing.”

King was also wary of letting the late fightback mask the problems.

“If we’d have came back and won this game, we’d have covered up a lot of the mistakes and things we’ve got to get better at,” he said.

“We need to see the things that are giving us problems in review and a lot of that is just straight line drives. 

“Why can we do that in the second half, but not the first? We need to figure out why we can’t put close to 40 minutes together. That’s a problem.

“A lot of what we do is play with energy, play with toughness, play with fight, play with pride. 

“I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for, but in this day and age, it seems like it is sometimes a lot to ask for, which is unfortunate.”

South East Melbourne next travels to Sydney on Sunday to face the first-placed Kings from 3pm AEDT, live on ESPN.