Thank You for the Motivation. Love, Sydney.
Thirteen experts picked an NBL27 champion. Not one picked the team holding the trophy. Three games in, the Kings are the only unbeaten side left.
Thirteen experts picked an NBL27 champion. Not one picked the team holding the trophy. Three games in, the Kings are the only unbeaten side left.
Thirteen experts on the NBL's own panel picked an NBL27 champion. Not one picked the team holding the trophy. Three games in, Sydney are the only unbeaten side left. So, genuinely, thank you. You gave the Kings more motivation.
Saturday morning in a little shop off Crown Street. Three chairs, two blokes getting cleaned up, and one chair nobody sits in. The barber is a Lebanese-Australian bloke from Bankstown who opened the shop in the late 2000s, around the time the Kings folded, when a Kings singlet was something you only found at the back of a cupboard. He keeps that third chair open on purpose. It's for the doubters, he says. Any time they want a trim, it's theirs.
Back in the middle of September, he printed a page off NBL.com.au and taped it to the mirror, right next to the price list. It's still there. The corners are curling now, and it's got company.
Fair is fair, so here's exactly what that page says. On 14 September, NBL.com.au ran its "Way Too Early Predictions" with a panel of 13. When it came to the championship, Adelaide got nine votes. Tasmania, Melbourne, Illawarra and South East Melbourne got one each. The reigning champions got a donut.
They weren't called rubbish, mind you. Sydney made 12 of the 13 top six lists. Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and the Phoenix made all 13. So the panel rated them. Just not as a team that could do it again. Nine reported that only Mark Worthington had them finishing inside the top four.
The talking heads backed it up. On NBL Now, Derek Rucker was asked if the Kings could go back to back. "I don't think so, considering the way the other teams have built, but you can never, you just can't count Goorjian out." Chris Anstey said, "I don't see them finishing top two and having that home-court advantage all the way through." Fox Sports put them in the contender tier and then added the knife: "on paper at least, Sydney appears to have gone backwards."
And to be square about it, not everyone jumped. Jai Shadlow at Fox tipped Sydney to go back to back. Anstey and Rucker both said you never write off a Goorjian side. Somebody shout those three a coffee. The rest can take a number and wait for the open chair.
Davis didn't even land in the country until a week or so before the season. Passport drama. Missed the Blitz, missed the preseason, walked straight off the plane into questions about the panel.
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He answered them like a bloke who'd been waiting all winter to be asked. "Last year we had zero votes of winning a championship," he told Fox Sports. When they reminded him Adelaide got the most votes the year before, he said, "Well they're not experts then if they ain't getting sh** right."
To Nine, he was even plainer. "We understand we're the champs, but now we back to underdogs, right? Nobody picking us again."
That's the whole mechanism, and it's older than any of us. Some teams hear doubt and get tight. Title teams hear doubt and get specific. Every tip that went elsewhere becomes a reason to box out one more time, to chase one more loose ball, to guard a bloke for the full 94 feet when a normal team would pick him up at halfway. A banner in the rafters makes you comfortable. A printout on the mirror makes you hungry.
Not highlights. Chores.
Banner night against Cairns on 20 September, 111-90 in front of 13,632, with Davis on 26. Nice. Expected. Then Illawarra on 27 September, 121-100, and the number that tells you the mood isn't Davis's 31. It's the rebounds: 46 to 25. You don't win the glass by 21 on talent. You win it by wanting the ball more than the other mob. That was also Brian Goorjian's 600th NBL win, extending his own Australian record, and he spent part of the night unhappy with his starters' defence. Six hundred wins and still cranky. That's the culture in one sentence.
Then Wednesday night just gone, the one that really counts. Brisbane came in 2-0 with Will Weaver on the bench and Arnas Velička running the show, averaging 20 points and 12.5 assists. The Bullets led 34-23 at quarter time and looked every bit of it.
Goorjian put Matthew Dellavedova on Velička and told him to go full court. When it wasn't Delly, it was Torrey Craig, and when it wasn't Craig, it was Makuach Maluach. Velička finished with 15 and five. Sydney won the last three quarters 70-44.
Here's the bit I keep coming back to. The Kings shot 6 from 26 from three. Davis went 0 from 7. On a night where your best shooter can't buy one, a comfortable team loses that game and blames the rims. Sydney went 21 from 26 at the line, held Brisbane to 17 from 56 over the last three quarters, and won by 15. Davis still got 24, eight boards and seven assists without a single triple. (Yes, the free throw line keeps showing up in these columns. That's a fight for next week.)
A team playing for the banner it already has doesn't win like that. A team playing to shove a printout down the panel's throat does.
By 28 September, the Fox Sports power rankings had Sydney first. The same outlet that said they'd gone backwards. Same day, NBL.com.au's Starting 5 opened with this line: "After zero experts tipped the reigning champions to repeat in NBL27..."
Nobody's apologising, and nobody should. It's three games. Keli Leaupepe is gone for the season with his knee, the roster is younger than last year's, and Fox rightly pointed out that the first two wins came against two of the poorer teams in the league. The ladder in February won't care about September.
But you asked a champion to prove it, and they're proving it on the dirty end of the floor, which is the only proof that ever lasts.
Sunday 11 October, 3pm AEDT, Afterpay Arena. Adelaide.
Of course it's Adelaide. The team nine of the 13 picked. The team the Kings beat 113-101 in overtime in Game 5 on 5 April, the night Davis dropped 35 and 14 assists and was named NBL Championship Series MVP for NBL26. The panel's favourite walks into the building of the team the panel forgot.
My call: Kings win it. Not because they're better on paper. Paper already had its say, and it's curling on a mirror in Surry Hills. They win it because Adelaide came into the season as the answer, and Sydney has spent three weeks treating that like an insult.
The barber isn't taking the page down. Not after Adelaide, not after Christmas. He says it comes off the mirror in April, or it doesn't come off at all. The third chair stays open. Any expert who wants to sit in it is welcome. First cut's on the house.
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Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
Rico Holt runs on readers, not bookies or big media money. If this one's getting printed and taped to a mirror in your life, shout the next column.
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