Adelaide 36ers coach Joey Wright slams his team as ‘selfish’ and ‘unprofessional’ after shock loss to Illawarra on Friday night
Joey Wright is never one to mince his words and on Friday night he pulled the trigger on his team after admitting they underestimated the bottom-placed Hawks and paid the price.
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Adelaide 36ers coach Joey Wright never misses post-match and was at his straight-shooting best after Friday night’s shock loss to Illawarra.
Wright slammed his team as “selfish”, “unprofessional” and “pretty crappy” after admitting they underestimated the bottom-placed Hawks and were too busy worrying about their own games rather than the team which lost 93-84 at the Entertainment Centre.
He said the bad attitudes crept in two hours after last Sunday’s game against New Zealand but didn’t detail what or why.
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Training on Tuesday was switched from the stadium at St Clair to the beach and the Sixers were still way too relaxed on Friday night as an undermanned Illawarra controlled the game from start to finish.
Wright blamed a lack of effort for his team losing the rebound count 30-44 and giving up 16 offensive boards which gave Illawarra second looks at the basket and confidence.
But the most damning criticism was admitting his team simply didn’t respect the Hawks who were missing LaMelo Ball and Josh Boone.
“That’s exactly what it was, and that started two hours after we beat New Zealand,” Wright said.
“Our attitude as a group was extremely unprofessional, our approach was unprofessional and we got an unprofessional result.
“That’s (why) for our group to know, but we definitely acted unprofessionally.
“I just think our egos got ahead of ourselves, bottom line, I think we thought this would be an easy one and we acted like it all week and it caught up to us.”
Daniel Johnson, who had 19 points, said there was a “different feel” among the group after back-to-back wins last weekend.
“The effort and intensity wasn’t there and it’s frustrating knowing we were in a good position and could have set ourselves up,” he said.
“They (Illawarra) just wanted it more like Joey said, we weren’t helping each other out and the effort wasn’t there.”
The good news is they don’t have to wait long to make amends after flying to Cairns on Saturday to play the Taipans on Sunday evening.
“I’ve said it before, when I was a player if I played bad or didn’t put my best foot forward then having another game (straight after) is really good, it’s hard to sit on games for a week when you play as bad as we did tonight,” Wright said.
“We were one of the leaders in field goal percentage, tonight our first five or six jump shots were all contested - we had some good looks at the bucket with DJ - and once we didn’y look at that we lost some intensity as a group.
“We thought about ourselves way too much, it was a complete example of what being selfish is all about.
“Just don’t do it, think about the team, for me and in every team I played in it’s a lot easer to go in thinking ‘what can I do for the group?’ rather than having to score 30.
“I go out there thinking about playing d (defence), communicating, boxing out and if I’m open I’ll shoot the ball, but we didn’t think about that tonight - we thought what we were going to get out of it because we thought we already had the win.”
Asked whether he would make personnel changes to play the Taipans, Wright said:
“I got 12 guys and all of them were pretty crappy.”
reece.homfray@news.com.au