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Illawarra have finished their home stand with four wins in a row, defeating Cairns 97-82.
It was the Hawks big three of Kevin Lisch, Kirk Penney and AJ Ogilvy who provided most of the home sides scoring opportunities They provided 59 points towards the win and all three currently feature in the top six in the league for points-per-game.
“They’re (Cairns) last year’s grand finalists, so we have an enormous amount of respect for them and we know they are always going to come at us and I thought we did a really good job particularly defensively,” an elated Rob Beveridge said.
The home side lead at every interval and exploded in the last quarter as they piled on late points to consolidate their position in the top four.
“It was very impressive for us to just keep that consistency going, we want to minimise the ups and downs and I think we’re starting to get that done,” Beveridge said.
The home side got great value from their bench, who contributed 34 points to the Taipans 20.
Rhys Martin provided some slick passes to find his teammates for five assists.
Tim Coenraad also provided some big numbers off the bench with 17 points and looks to be shining in his new role as sixth man for the Hawks.
“That’s a new role for him (Coenraad), and he needs to get used to it but I thought tonight he was fantastic,” Beveridge said.
For Cairns it was their third loss in four games, leaving the Taipans with a record of five wins and nine losses, they have a lot of work to do as the season reaches its halfway point.
“We’re not going to win a game giving up close to a hundred (points)…our goal was to keep them closer to 80, we failed in that end,” Taipans coach Aaron Fearne said.
“When you look at our offensive numbers; we shot the ball pretty well; we got to the foul line a lot and shot the three ball pretty well.”
The Taipans will have to right a lot of wrongs as they face the Hawks again in a couple of days.
“Getting Matty (Burston) back will help, having that lack of size in there hurt and to lose him 20 minutes before tip off is pretty tough,” Fearne said.
The Hawks held a solid lead in a stop-start but tidy first half which featured 20 fouls but only four turnovers.
Hawks guard Kevin Penney lead the scoring for the home side with 11 points.
It took until the second quarter for Stephen Weigh to register his first basket, but the Taipans small forward soon had 13 points, including three from beyond the arc to finish the half.
The Taipans stuck with the Hawks and got within two points in the third quarter thanks to some great looks inside to Markel Starks who top scored for Cairns with 19 points.
“We had that little run in the third and were getting back but they went bang, bang, bang – three, threes in a row, game over,” Fearne said.
On a lighter note, pride was finally restored to Australian basketball when a stoked Illawarra fan nailed a half-court shot, making up for the farcical scene at Cairns last week.
For those who missed it last week a Cairns supporter, who had probably never touched a basketball in her life, attempted probably the worst half-court shot in human history – the ball went a whopping two feet as she looked for a hole big enough to swallow her up.
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