“We’re Really Soft”, Declares Hawks Veteran

Illawarra veteran Tim Coenraad has emotionally declared the Hawks are “really soft” after dropping to 1-5.

Disappointment flared for Illawarra as a poor effort resulted in an 82-56 loss to the Brisbane Bullets on Monday night.

Hoping to fix the mistakes and turn the season around, Coenraad said he might need to “step out of character” at practice to give the team the shake-up they need.

“Right now we are soft on rebounds, we get picked, we don’t fight over screens,” Coenraad said.

“We are in a real hole right now and no one is feeling good about themselves.

“The only way you can get better at this is if we start really looking ourselves in the mirror and saying hey, right now, we're really soft.

“There is no real bite to our defence and we need to get that back. Maybe we’ve got guys that are a bit too nice.

“It’s hard to change those things really quick, it needs to be practice, and we need to start being accountable, especially in practice, because they’re the habits you create going into games.”

The Bullets came off too strong for the Hawks, out-rebounding them 52-41 and scoring 42 points in the paint.

Disheartened Illawarra coach Jacob Jackomas simply declared “we need to be better, just all around we need to be better”.

“We probably relied on the three ball a little bit too much and didn’t get our feet in the paint at all, which we’ll look at,” the Hawks coach continued.

“We were on a path of being pretty good and now we're on a path of being pretty bad. We got to get to that good path again.”

The Hawks have a chance to redeem themselves quickly, as they meet the Bullets again on Thursday night.

“I don’t want to sit on that one for a week, I want to go back and have another smack at them,” Coenraad said.

Reinforcements are coming for Illawarra, with new signing Peyton Siva to debut on Thursday night.

However, Jackomas isn’t holding the responsibility to turn the season around just on Siva’s shoulders.

“It’s not going to be when Peyton comes in, this is all going to be fixed…it’s all of us right now,” Jackomas said.

“He’ll be playing, he’ll be apart of the team. I feel that he will just fit in and he knows the league, so that’s the advantage of bringing Peyton in.

“We’ll give him the best opportunity to be good.”