Flames hoping Game 1 calamity was a one-off bad night

THE past three SBL seasons could hardly have gone better for the Rockingham Flames winning two Women's championships and now finishing second again in 2016 and not having lost a playoff game in that time.

But that all came crashing down with a thud last Friday night when the Willetton Tigers thrashed the Flames by 23 points at Mike Barnett Sports Complex in a game where Rockingham was never in the hunt.

There was little indication of what was to come with the Flames having won the last two championships and having now added Ifunanya Ibekwe to a group still including the likes of Sami Whitcomb, Darcee Garbin, Jacinta Bourne, Tarsha Fletcher and Ashlee Sidebottom.

But aside from a minute burst just before half-time when Sidebottom hit back-to-back threes, the Flames were dominated by the Tigers on their home floor in a rematch of last year's Grand Final.

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Rockingham now needs to win at Willetton Basketball Stadium on Friday night to force a deciding Game 3 back at Mike Barnett Sports Complex on Saturday night with a spot in the 2016 Grand Final at stake.

The loss on Friday came as a bolt out of the blue for Flames coach Ryan Petrik with Rockingham not having lost a finals match since Game 3 against the Lady Wolfpack in the 2013 semi finals.

And aside from the opening round blowout to start 2016 when both teams didn’t have their WNBL players, the Flames haven't lost a game by more than 23 points since a 51-point drubbing at the hands of Willetton back on June 22, 2013.

The Flames had also beaten the Tigers late in the season to guarantee second position and then had no trouble in the quarter finals against the Perth Redbacks. Because of all that, Petrie isn’t panicking after last Friday but he sure didn’t like what he saw.

"Taking the first game of the season out when both teams had people out, that's our heaviest loss in quite a while," Petrik said.

"That's the whole reason for not throwing the baby out with the bath water. It was a lot to do with how Willetton played, but I don’t think we can play worse than that. We do have to get a lot better very quickly though."

While offensively things didn’t go well for the Flames shooting just 29 per cent from the floor and giving up 15 turnovers as the Tigers focused their attention on putting enormous pressure on Whitcomb by Ebony Antonio and Lara Napier, it was defensively where Petrik was left baffled.

He watched on and saw an almost disinterest from his group for much of the night to play defence and considering what was at stake and the quality of opposition, Petrik could do little from the sideline as Kate Malpass dominated while Louella Tomlinson and Desiree Kelley were tremendous.

"Lacking would be a nice way of describing our defensive effort, I have many other adjectives to use for our effort on that end of the court and that's really bad. There's no excuse for that," he said.

"We are at home against a Grand Final team trying to make our third Grand Final in-a-row, and if you can't get motivated for that I don’t know when you can. We certainly weren’t and they were. Credit to Willetton, they wanted to kill us and they did.

"We talked about the whole killing the head of the snake, well how did that go? Everyone knows it was Malpass and she tore us up. You can argue who is better out of Lou or Kate, but for us Malpass has always been the one we need to try and stop because she's their general.

"Lou is obviously their best defensive player but Kate drives them offensively and she completely got away from us. Normally we've done a pretty good job on her but we didn’t in this game and she made a lot of tough shots, but we also made a lot of poor decisions in guarding her."

Whitcomb being put under pressure and double-teamed is nothing new for the Flames to cope with, but usually they have handled that with the likes of Garbin, Bourne, Sidebottom, Fletcher and company stepping up and now Ibekwe is there to do that too.

But that didn’t happen and Petrik knows they have to in Game 2 on Friday night before the Flames can even think about forcing the series to a decider back in Rockingham on Saturday.

"Normally when teams get after Sam we've got second, third and fourth options. The problem was that none of them put up good numbers or shot the ball well, therefore they could continue to harass Sam," he said.

"Teams have regularly trapped Sam and we accept the trap and play four on three, and if you want to trap Sam we have four other good players on the court. But in that game with four on three we still shot under 30 per cent.

"Sam needs help and teammates to step up and make shots, because then it puts it back onto Simon to decide if he wants to keep trapping her. But if we aren’t making shots, he can continue to trap Sam and it won't hurt him at all."

Petrik is hoping that the performance and heavy loss could be just the wake up call the Flames needed to prove they need to be at their best if they hope to win a third straight championship.

Sometimes it can be hard for players to want to change anything if they are winning, but Petrik hopes now they might sit up and take some more notice.

"We've said for years that you are never as good or bad as you think. We were horrific and I don’t think we can play any worse. If you are looking for positives, when you win it's hard to make too many adjustments," Petrik said.

"You can tweak little things but you feel good about things. This week Willetton will be feeling good after winning by 23 and it would be crazy for them to change too much, whereas we can change a lot of things and we have to.

"If we play like that again we will lose by 30 on their court. At least it gives us something to work on."

Article by Chris Pike
Photo by June Halliday




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