Illawarra gear up for tough NBL slog

After almost a month's drought from time on the court, we suddenly face an avalanche of games in the coming week or so.

You've got to be ready to play at any moment with the NBL's schedule.

We were expecting to play on Thursday this week, and that's obviously now not happening, so next week's going to be huge for us.

We'll be kind of playing every other day, so we're trying to use this week to get ready for what's coming next.

This is the time where all of the work that we did in the pre-season comes back, and puts us in a position to succeed and make the most of these games coming quickly. But it's going to be tough, we have four games in a week.

If you drop a bunch of those, it can swing your season the wrong way, so we want to make sure we're putting our best foot forward every time we're on court.

First of all, we're focused on our game this weekend against the Wildcats.

We'll review the games that we played last week and then set ourselves a target going forward, but it's hard with so many games close together because you don't want to look past any of the contest.

But I'm sure coach Goorjian will have us focused on one game at a time.

On the flip side, it's great to have all of these games at home.

Playing so many games that close is hard enough, but it would be much tougher if we had to jump on and off planes, and then be in and out of cars after every game.

It's exciting to string a few games together here at the WEC.

We know it's still a bit crazy in the Illawarra here with COVID at the moment, but we're hoping we can get a couple of wins and get some fans down to the game because I think we're putting together a great product on the court this year.

And we need all the support we can get.

We appreciated the home support for our game against Melbourne United on Sunday.

The crowd was probably a little less than we had expected, but we understand that there's so much going on at the moment, so you can hardly blame people for staying home and watching it.

But the people who came were so loud and they helped create such a great atmosphere.

Speaking of the United game, we're keen to make amends quickly for that loss.

I think we did a great job of sticking to our scout report.

We really limited those guys that have been putting up big numbers, like Jo Lual Acuil and Chris Goulding. But obviously Matthew Dellavedova had one of the best games of his career against us, which we probably didn't account for.

But the good thing is I think that we've still got a lot of room for growth and a lot of areas that we can improve on, which will put us in good stead when we come up against United next time.