It's been a big week Sharks Fans! We are stoked to have added the first pieces to our roster for 2018. If you missed the news, Reuben, Luke and Jimmy will all be back in orange next season. Click the news link above to catch up.
Great to get these building blocks in place and we'll have more names for you over the next week or so (insert excited emoji here!!)
How good has the start of the ANBL been. It's been awesome to follow all the boys in action. Great opportunity for the NBL to have three teams travel to the States to play NBA pre-season, but is there a hang-over effect? With the kilometres Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane have had to cover there's got to be a downside, but to be honest, you take this chance 100 times out of 100, right?
You've got to feel for Reubs, who picked up a bit of a hip injury while in Phoenix with Brisbane, which limited him to just a handful of minutes against the Suns. But we still got this ...
How good a week have the NZ Breakers had? They added to poor Andrew Gaze's misery as Sydney King's coach with a big 90-73 win at Spark Arena on Thursday. They lead by 24 at the break, courtesy of @nblfacts on Twitter, their largest home halftime lead in their 225-game history! If you haven't seen Gaze's press conference after that game it's worth going looking for it. "There's three teams, then a group of teams who are very good ... then there's us!" He was great, embracing the tough situation his team has dug for itself early. Yesterday's 30-point loss to Adelaide probably didn't help however.
But back to the Breakers ... Chief was on fire! His 19-point effort meant the Pledgehammer was a one-man highlights machine
And if that was a little fancy for you ...
So good to see James and Derone getting good minutes in the fourth quarter, Jimmy scoring 5 in a busy seven and a half minutes.
But that was just the entree. Today off to Melbourne they went with a record home opener crowd of over 10,000 at Hisense Arena and they never looked like be headed after halftime to run away with a 88-76 win to go 3-1 with a chance to go top of the table if Perth get tipped over in tonight's late game.
Turns out Tom Abercrombie is quite good at basketball.
Incredibly that is now 9 wins from their last 10 meetings for the Breakers!
Our Aussie mates have had a tough start with Norto and Nick and their Hawks starting 0-3 and needing something to get them going tonight against the Bullets.
Enter Mr Kay ...
The Bullets lead by 14 after 10 minutes, lead by 10 at the main break, before the HawkHeads came alive in the third and held on down the stretch to win 105-96 after a few nervous moments in the final couple of minutes. Norto is 1/1 as captain. Well done boys.
Keep an eye out this week for our Sharks Fan survey. It's a big off-season for us as we make plans for 2018. We are eight years in and are looking to crank things up to another level next season and we'd love your ideas on how we can do that. And as a thank you for taking the time to help, we've got a free 2018 Season's pass up for grabs, drawn at the end of the month.
You'll find the link on our Facebook page and here on the website tomorrow morning.
Enjoy the rest of your long weekend and look forward to bringing you more good news this week.
Fins Up!
