Taipans Not in Sync vs Wildcats

The Cairns Taipans suffered a disappointing loss on Tuesday night to the Perth Wildcats, with coach Adam Forde lamenting his club was not in sync.

The league’s best ranked defence gave up an upsetting 105 points to the Wildcats, while TaShawn Thomas kept Keanu Pinder quiet and he put up 22 points and 12 rebounds of his own. 

It led to a poor showing from Cairns, with Forde hoping his team is able to respond.

“I looked at the first quarter, I think Thomas really came out aggressive and he put Pinder on the back foot,” Forde said.

“Not all five guys being in sync, especially on defence.

“We can sit there and cry about it or we can recognise the situation that we’re in, the adversity that we’re facing and how we respond to that and how we navigate it, and we’re getting better.

“There were signs of that time of us to process what’s going and to move on has reduced, so it’s going to look good in a month’s time when again things aren’t falling our way and how we’re managing how to weather that storm.

“We unravelled quicker than we usually did just because it’s the third quarter and it’s the heat of the battle, we weathered the first storm, it took us longer to try and regroup in the second weathering of the storm.

“I think it was an accumulation of multiple things that played out in what you saw tonight.”

The Taipans head to Melbourne for a tough matchup with a United side who have won two in a row on Friday night.

“The road caught up a little bit, this is our fourth game now, we’ve got another one in Melbourne which we’ll finish out a five-game stretch in two weeks,” Forde said.

Import guard Shannon Scott added, “we have to move on from this game, we understand what we did in our last game and with Perth. We’ve got to learn from our mistakes and be better on our rebounding and be better with our turnovers.”

“Melbourne are playing good ball right now; we have to come out and be prepared for them and find a way to win that one.”

The Taipans play Melbourne on Friday night at 7:30pm AEDT for the first open-air game in two years.