Turnovers Kill Wildcats' Momentum

The New Zealand Breakers overcame Perth in an offensive shootout on Wednesday night. They emerged from New Plymouth with an exciting three-point victory, in which both teams threatened to break the 100-point barrier.

The high-powered offensive trio of Bryce Cotton, Corey Webster and Brady Manek once again caught fire for the Wildcats and combined to score 71 of the team’s 94 points, but it wasn’t enough to combat the scoring prowess of Breakers back-court duo Barry Brown Jr and Izayah Le’Afa.

The offensive side of the ball hasn’t been the main issue for Perth across NBL23. They lost the rebound count against the Breakers – a statistic that has become a theme of their season – as well as giving up a massive 18 turnovers.

Head coach John Rillie says that turnover count is unacceptable.

“We’ve done a good job of taking care of the ball [but] we had 18 turnovers,” Rille said post-game. “For how good we were offensively and to be in that type of groove, to have 18 turnovers we’re penalising ourselves an opportunity to score points.

“I thought New Zealand did a great job of beating us to the 50/50 type of balls, the one percenter type of plays, and when you play a close game like that those things really show up.”

Every Perth player who took to the floor for at least 10 minutes had two or more turnovers on the night, and Corey Webster was no exception.

Despite having just a pair of turnovers in his 36 minutes he says he felt his side didn’t protect the ball.

“That was us being sloppy,” Webster said. “When it gets to the end of the season we can’t have that many turnovers.

“You can see how potent we are at the offensive end without those turnovers, so we need to clean that up.”

Strong runs in the second and third quarters saw New Zealand enter the final term with an almost double-digit lead, but Perth managed to find a way back into the game.

Brady Manek had the chance to send the game to overtime with just two seconds remaining, however he missed a tough corner three that would have tied the game up.

Despite losing the game Rillie says he’s pleased with how his team fought back.

“This team is showing throughout the season already that when most people would be writing us off, we have the ability to get back in the game,” he said.

“That part I don’t like is we don’t need to put ourselves in that situation as often as we do.

“It’s easy to reflect on the second quarter – the way the opposition has to work for a period, the buckets were just too high percentage of shots consistently.

“We need to get stops and our defence has to improve. Even tonight we scored enough points, we just had some moments.”