The Kings Are Charging Rent, and Brisbane Knocks Tonight
Two games, two 21-point hidings. Sydney aren't out-shooting you, they're out-counting you. Brisbane, also 2-0, get the invoice tonight.
Two games, two 21-point hidings. Sydney aren't out-shooting you, they're out-counting you. Brisbane, also 2-0, get the invoice tonight.
Result, Thu 1 Oct
Kings 93, Bullets 78. I called double figures. They won by 15. Before the victory lap, the honest count.
Brisbane came out swinging, 34-23 at quarter time, and the bloke with the half fade was reaching for his phone. Then the Kings won the last three quarters 70-44, with Dellavedova living in Velička's pocket.
Now the bits I got wrong. I said Davis would get to the line ten times. He took six free throws and made all six, on his way to 24 points, 8 boards and 7 assists. Miss. I said Brisbane's only escape was winning the boards. They won the boards 45-44 and lost by 15 anyway. Miss, and a fair cop.
What held up: the Kings went 6 from 26 from three and still cruised, going 21 from 26 at the line to Brisbane's 9 from 13, and turning it over 8 times to 14. Mind you, they also bullied Brisbane inside the arc, 54 points to 30, so it wasn't all whistles. Maluach added 19 off the bench.
Kings are 3-0, the only unbeaten team left. Next up: Adelaide at the Afterpay, Sun 11 Oct, 3pm AEDT. Count the trips.
The preview, as filed 30 Sep
Picture the chair by the window on a Monday arvo. Clippers humming, the Sunday replay still looping on the telly above the mirrors, and a bloke with half a fade calling it early. "Kings are cooked for the title," he says. "Too old, too comfortable, and they lost Keli again."
The barber doesn't stop cutting. He just points the comb at the screen, where Kendric Davis is standing at the free throw line for what feels like the fortieth time, and says, "Mate. Count the trips."
That's the whole column, really. But let's earn it.
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Sydney have opened the NBL27 title defence 2-0, and both wins came by exactly 21. Cairns went first, 111-90 at Afterpay Arena on 20 September, with Davis on 26 points, six assists and five boards and Xavier Cooks chipping in 18 and seven. Then on Sunday night the Kings did something rude to Illawarra in the first Freeway Series game of the season: 121-100, in front of 9,402, with the Hawks still hunting their first win.
Davis had 31 and six assists. In under 28 minutes. He went 10 from 11 at the line. Torrey Craig added 20, and Makuach Maluach had the kind of night you frame and hang in the hallway: 19 points, six from six from the field, three from three from deep, four from four at the stripe. Didn't miss a thing. Barely broke a sweat doing it.
Sunday was also Brian Goorjian's 600th NBL win, which extends his own Australian record for wins by a head coach. Six hundred. Some of us can't find 600 minutes to go to the gym.
And that was the Kings' 11th straight win at the Afterpay, 15 from their last 16 there. Home court isn't a slogan out west. It's a lease, and the rent is due every time you walk in.
Here's where the bloke in the chair gets it wrong. He watched the highlights and saw threes and lobs and Davis doing Davis things, so he figures the Kings are a hot-shooting side riding a heater. Heaters cool. Fair logic. Wrong read.
Look at the two numbers that actually decided Sunday. Sydney out-rebounded Illawarra 46-25. And Sydney went to the free throw line 32 times to the Hawks' 17.
Put those together and you get the Kings' real trick. They win the possession count. More boards means more trips down the floor. More trips to the line means points with the clock stopped, no defence to beat, just a guy and a rim. You can have a cold shooting night and still win if you're getting 15 or 20 extra looks the other mob never gets.
Davis is the engine of it. He's a scorer, sure, but he's also a foul magnet with a point guard's brain. He gets into the paint, draws contact, and cashes it. Ten from 11 is not luck, it's a business model. And because the Kings keep blowing teams out, Goorjian can pull him before 28 minutes and let the bench carry the load. In September that matters. Every quiet 12 minutes Davis spends on the pine now is a tank of fuel he's got left for February and March, when the whistles tighten and the games stop being 21-point jogs.
So when people ask whether Sydney can repeat, forget whether Davis keeps hitting 31. The question is whether anyone can stop the Kings getting more shots than them. Through two rounds, nobody has come close.
Shooting runs hot and cold. Boards and trips to the line travel.
I'm not going to pretend the roster's bulletproof. Keli Leaupepe is gone for the whole of NBL27 after doing his ACL again, and he'd already missed all of NBL26 with the first one. That's brutal for him, and it's a real hole in the frontcourt rotation. Size and bodies matter most in exactly the stat I just told you wins them games: rebounding.
And the ladder doesn't care about vibes. Right now there are only two unbeaten teams in the league. Sydney is one. The other one walks into the Afterpay tonight.
Wednesday night, 7:30pm AEST, Ignite Cup game at Afterpay Arena: Kings v Bullets, both 2-0.
Don't treat this one as a throwaway. Brisbane have Will Weaver on the bench now, and tonight is his first trip back to Sydney since he coached the Kings into the NBL20 Championship Series. He knows the building, he knows the crowd, and he knows exactly what it feels like to be the team everyone's chasing.
He's also got Arnas Velička, who has come into this league like he's late for something. Double-digit assists in each of his first two games, 23 and 14 on debut, then 17 and 11. The NBL says the last bloke to open with back-to-back double-digit assist games was Derek Rucker in 1990. Fluke? Nah. The bloke makes everyone around him eat.
So tonight is the cleanest possible test of my theory. Velička wants to speed the game up and make it a passing clinic. Davis wants to slow it at the right moments and live at the line. If Brisbane can hang on the glass with a thinner rotation (they're missing Sam McDaniel and Taine Murray), they turn it into a shootout, and in a shootout anyone can win. If they can't, the Kings do to them what they did to Cairns and Illawarra. They just get more goes at it.
Yes. Not "yes, but." Yes.
The Kings are the team to beat because the thing they're best at doesn't slump. Shooting runs hot and cold. Rebounding and getting fouled are effort, size and smarts, and those travel. Davis is the reigning Championship Series MVP playing short minutes on purpose. Goorjian is 600 wins deep and still greedy. The home floor is a fortress with 9,000-odd people paying to watch visitors lose.
Who pays? Everyone who tries to beat them by trading baskets. Illawarra already paid. Cairns paid. Tonight Brisbane gets the invoice, and the only way they dodge it is to win the boards. If they do, I'll be back in this chair eating my words with a side of hot chips.
But I'm not booking the table. My call: Kings by double figures, Davis to the line at least ten times, and the bloke with the half fade quietly asking for a number two all over, just to hide.
Count the trips.
Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
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