Cairns Committee Step up in Centre's Absence

With their victory over Illawarra last night the Cairns Taipans have finished Round 13 with a pair of wins, both without star centre and bona fide MVP candidate Keanu Pinder in the line-up.

Adam Forde has lauded the ‘by committee’ approach his side has taken to cover for the loss of Pinder at both ends of the floor. Against the Hawks its was guard Ben Ayre who stepped up in the scoring column with 15 points off the bench, while Sam Waardenburg finished just one rebound shy of a double-double.

With the dynamic tall duo of Sam Froling and Mangok Mathiang wreaking havoc in the paint for Illawarra though, Forde says his side is still working on covering Pinder’s defensive contributions.

“What hurt us was the 56 points in the paint,” Forde said post-game. “If anything it sort of exposes the void we’re trying to fill with Keanu – and that’s not going to be an overnight solution.

“Our offence is generated by a lot of transition breaks, there’s no secret with that. When they’re shooting a lot of foul shots and they’re getting a lot of points in the paint that slows us down.

“When it’s stunted it’s ‘let’s roll it into KP’ … we didn’t have that as well.

“We’re trying to find different avenues to score and get stops by committee. We’re still learning.”

The absence of Pinder has placed added pressure on the shoulders of first-year big Sam Waardenburg.

Starting alongside veteran centre Majok Deng, Waardenburg was tasked with stopping the ever-dangerous Sam Froling, who performed at the peak of his powers to finish the contest with a game-high 25 points.

Waardenburg says everyone is pitching in to cover the loss of Pinder.

“Losing KP, that’s tough. He’s our MVP candidate guy,” Waardenburg said. “But we understand what we need to do and we understand the guys who need to step up.

“We have guys like ‘JD’ (Josh Davey) and Ben (Ayre) coming in and playing big minutes, Mirko stepping up and hitting that four-point play to give us energy.

“Everyone is stepping up and the energy with the boys is really high right now.”

Illawarra has now slumped to a 2-17 record for the season. However their loss to the Taipans was their ninth loss this season by a margin of ten points or less, including their pair of double-overtime losses to Cairns and Melbourne.

Imports Peyton Siva and Michael Frazier II were both missing in the loss, and it was once again Tyler Harvey who stepped up to carry much of the scoring load from the team’s guards.

After finishing with just nine wins last season, Forde and the Taipans have been one of NBL23’s resurgent success stories, and the Cairns coach says he sees a lot of his own side in the Hawks.

“I remember ‘Goorj’ (former Illawarra coach Brian Goorjian) saw what we were trying to build in Cairns. He saw the early stages of it,” Forde reflected.

“One of the things he said was we were doing a good job and once we got our pieces we were going to be dangerous. He saw that in us and I have to acknowledge you see it with those guys.

“I spoke with (Tyler) Harvey and Jacob (Jackomas), and you can see these guys are really committed, and they’re just a couple of pieces away from being in the winner’s column.

“It’s great we got the win on the road, it’s great we got the win without KP, but we didn’t walk into this place thinking it was going to be a pushover.”