Analysis: How did most-talented Boomers squad assembled bomb out of FIBA World Cup?
Ben Simmons has given his strongest hint yet he will finally play for the Boomers at the Paris Olympics. But, how much difference will the NBA star make? MICHAEL RANDALL analyses Australia’s World Cup failure.
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Luka Doncic seized on the ball off the first tip, took one dribble and laid it into the basket.
Just four seconds had ticked off the clock but it was the first warning shot the most-talented Boomers squad ever assembled was 39 minutes and 56 seconds away from having their FIBA World Cup dreams crushed by the NBA superstar and his Slovenian team.
It was that quick, the cameraman on the FIBA World Cup broadcast struggled to keep up, just catching his finish as hapless Boomer Nick Kay tumbled to the floor under the basket.
Twenty-nine seconds later, Doncic mesmerised the Luka-centric Aussie defence again, finding his big man in the paint, who kicked it out to Zoran Dragic for a corner three.
Another red alert for the Boomers, down 5-0.
It was a revenge game for the Slovenians, nine of whom were on the wrong end of the Boomers’ history-making Tokyo Olympic bronze medal win two years ago, and they came prepared.
The Boomers, courtesy of Sunday’s three-point loss to Germany and Die Mannschaft’s subsequent victory over Georgia earlier on Friday evening, went in with the added pressure of needing to win to be any hope of making it through to the quarterfinals.
One minute and 50 seconds later, the Aussies had squared it up at six through the Josh’s, Green and Giddey, and then Patty Mills.
That was as close as Australia got.
The Boomer had a plan to slow Slovenia’s superstar playmaker and force his teammates to beat them — blitz in pick n rolls, double him down low and get the ball out of his hands as often as possible — but the perfection required to make it work just wasn’t there. The Aussie defensive rotations and recovery were slow and Doncic was good enough to fight his way through.
Slovenian big man Mike Tobey (18 points, 12 rebounds, five assists) was the main beneficiary of Doncic’s pinpoint passing with plenty of gimmes at the hoop and open looks from mid-range and deep. When it wasn’t Tobey, it was one of the Slovenians’ array of marksmen, who didn’t exactly shoot it well (13-42, 31 per cent), but caught fire in the last to kill the game off.
It wasn’t a classic Doncic game. Foul trouble limited his playing time and his ability to defend, but that also left the Aussies struggling to adjust to long stretches without having to worry about the Slovenians’ main man.
A technical foul on Doncic for shooting the ball after the referee blew the whistle still with 7.43 to go in the second quarter and Slovenia leading 34-20 forced him to sit for over five-and-a-half minutes.
That should have been a blessing for the Boomers.
Instead, Doncic checked back in and extended the lead to 14, before a pair of Patty Mills threes kept the Boomers afloat.
With less than two minutes eclipsed in the third quarter, Doncic picked up his fourth foul, just one away from disqualification.
Slovenian coach Aleksander Sekulic, though, is a brave man, leaving his star man in and reverting to a zone defence to protect him.
He dared the Boomers to shoot from deep. They were nervy about it and, when they did fire away, outside of Mills in the first half (3-4), it didn’t go in (8-24 for the game).
Three-point shooting has been an achilles heel throughout the tournament, the 33 makes only good enough for 21st at the tournament and the 34.4 per cent on 96 attempts 15th.
It begs the question: why did Brian Goorjian take Chris Goulding to Okinawa at all?
Although injured in the lead up and perhaps lacking in-game fitness, Goulding’s one elite skill is shooting the three ball — he hit three of them 10 days ago against Georgia in a warm up.
If you want to bust open a zone defence, shooting is key. Surely one the greatest shooters in NBL history was worth a try?
Goorj is inarguably one of, if not the, greatest coaches in Australian basketball history but five-time NBL champion and former Boomers assistant Trevor Gleeson believes the legendary mentor missed a huge opportunity that could have tipped the game in Australia’s favour.
With 2.25 to go in the third, Doncic careened to the basket and clattered into Patty Mills, who appeared agonisingly close to establishing position that could have resulted in a charge call.
The referee, though, adjudicated a blocking foul on the Aussie co-captain.
Could Goorj have used his coach’s challenge in the hope a video review would turn the tables and force Doncic out of the game with his fifth foul?
Gleeson thinks so:
“I think Brian will look back and look to have the challenge there,” Gleeson said on ESPN.
“That’s a gamechanger. Any time you can take a superstar off the court … I think you’ve got to burn it.
“It might come up as still a block, but you’ve got to take that chance.”
Goorj kept his powder dry — and would not use a challenge in the game at all — while Doncic potted the two subsequent free throws and strolled to the bench, his team up nine.
If the keys to the Boomers hadn’t yet been handed over to Josh Giddey before the game, consider this team his for the next decade and change.
The 20-year-old put them on his back in the third, muscling his way to the bucket with 13 of his game-high 25 points — including seven in the last 1.15 — to draw the Aussies within four.
As Australia pressed, Sekulic remained brave. Giddey made another layup to start the third that put the Boomers within a single bucket.
Doncic continued to rest, though, sitting the first three minutes of the final frame as his teammates scored seven without answer on the Boomers, dredging up bad memories of the 10-0 run they surrendered to Germany to start the fourth less than a week ago.
From there, Doncic checked back in, the Slovenians went bang, bang and, when Klemen Prepelic hit from deep to put them up 15 with 3.38 to go, the game was done.
Dante Exum hurled the ball into the support, Goorj called time, urged his charges to play it out and then emptied the bench.
Doncic scored the last two points of the game — a pair of free throws, his 53rd and 54th from the charity stripe across four World Cup games — to take his personal total to 19 and, fittingly, he had the ball in his hands as time expired, grabbing the board after a late Dante Exum miss.
Giddey touched on the Boomers’ hurt in the mandatory post-game press conference.
“We knew coming into this that it was a do or die match and we had to win to keep our chances alive of winning a medal,” Giddey said.
“Obviously a lot of emotion that this is the end of our tournament and we can’t progress any further, it’s disappointing.”
As Slovenia celebrated, the demons of Tokyo vanquished, the devastated Boomers skipped the mixed zone at Okinawa Arena without stopping to speak with waiting media, their medal hopes over but still with a dead rubber game against Georgia to get up for on Sunday.
WHAT WENT WRONG IN THE WORLD CUP CAMPAIGN?
We’ve mentioned the shooting and the slow starts.
In the loss to Germany, the Boomers were down 8-0, then 16-5. They started slow against Finland and struggled early throughout their warm-up games.
Goorj made a change, inserting Josh Green into the starting five for Matisse Thybulle in Tuesday’s win over Japan and, on the surface, it worked.
But was it the perfect storm of a change and an inferior team?
Against Slovenia, the Boomers gave up the first five points and were down by 10 at quarter time, a big frustration for Giddey.
“These slow starts against good teams, like this, like Germany, it’s hard to come back and win,” Giddey said, post game.
“We were playing from behind all night trying to dig ourselves out of a hole that felt like it kept getting deeper and deeper.
“Every time we made a run, it was just hard to sustain.”
Finer basketball minds than us might need to tackle that one.
Losing the country’s best big man Jock Landale to an ankle injury on the eve of the tournament always loomed as a hammer blow.
Landale isn’t a traditional big gorilla, but he is wonderfully skilled, mobile, stretches defences and has a mongrel in him that is hard to replicate.
Could Goorj have looked at drafting in another big man to help Duop Reath in his absence?
Thon Maker, Keanu Pinder and Sam Froling were cut from the squad that trialled in Cairns, Aron Baynes was told before the camp he was out and a left-field option might have been Isaac Humphries.
At the end of the day, though, the Boomers’ lone centre Reath has played just 55 minutes in the tournament and only nine against Slovenia. Goorj has preferred to use the more switchable Xavier Cooks and then Nick Kay at the five. Although Kay particularly struggled when switched onto smaller guards and faster bigs, would another centre have seen the floor?
Landale’s eventual replacement Jack White produced a great performance against Finland, clamping its key man Lauri Markkanen, but was used sparingly in the other three games.
Was there an element of weight of expectation?
Gold vibes only has been the motto of the Boomers since pre-Tokyo.
They achieved rose gold vibes there but that only served to turn the heat up on this squad to do better at the World Cup.
With Landale out, niggles to Green and Goulding and the seismic change to the way the Boomers’ play, integrating the wildly talented Giddey, it just didn’t quite come together.
SO WHAT HAPPENS IN PARIS?
The good thing is, the Boomers have qualified for the Olympics.
And Ben Simmons has kind of committed to the green and gold — again.
“To me, I’m going to play when I’m ready. There hasn’t really been a time where I’ve been prepared and ready physically. But next year, my goal is to be on the Olympic team,” Simmons told Andscape this week — in the middle of the Aussie World Cup campaign, of course.
One of the most fascinating Aussie basketball what ifs is the trajectory of Simmons’ career, had then-Boomers coach Andrej Lemanis included him in that 2014 World Cup squad.
Would it have been a positive or a negative for both he and the Boomers?
On this current Boomers’ incarnation, he immediately fixes that one massive issue of switchability — he can guard just about anyone and does it better than any Australian, probably ever.
He can’t shoot, so there’s that — let’s hope Josh Giddey takes another leap with the three-ball during the NBA season and Green continues to develop that elite skill to help there — but, if you believe the hype that he’s ready to rock for Brooklyn and he produces a massive season and rolls into Paris flying, it could be the making of Ben — and the Boomers.
Slot Jock back in alongside him and you potentially have a starting line-up of Landale-Simmons-Green-Mills-Giddey for Paris.
So who goes out?
Well, Goulding and White, on the surface could be the unlucky men, given Goorj’s decision not to lean on them in Okinawa.
The NBA made a mistake not giving Goulding his chance — he is still one of, if not the, best shooters in Australia and he’s been a Boomers mainstay. White’s a great talent and the type of guy you want to go to war for you.
Kay is on the wrong side of 30 and, while he has been a great servant, his deficiencies became more apparent as the tournament wore on.
Owing to the aforementioned — and oft-mentioned — lack of shooting, the Boomers absolutely need Patty.
He turned 35 in the lead up to the World Cup and he’s been leant on heavily throughout the campaign — 31.5 minutes per night.
He’s had some incredible bursts, but the Boomers must find ways to get him some rest early in games so he can use his scoring punch later. As the Germans went on an 8-0 run, he poured in the Boomers’ first 13 points and had 17 at halftime. But he only took four shots after the long break for four points, finishing with 21.
Then, as the Boomers hunted clutch buckets, he had two turnovers in the last minute — remember when Giddey had the play drawn up for him, but the refs wouldn’t let him come back on the court, owing to the blood rule?
Against Slovenia, Mills kept the Aussies afloat again with 14 in the first half. But he was 1-4 on the back end for three points and 17 for the game.
He already needs back surgery from carrying the country, so will an out-and-out scoring machine please stand up for the Boomers to give him a rest?
We’ll whisper this last bit …
I’m, by no means, pensioning him off yet, but cue the outrage — he’s said it himself on numerous occasions: “Father Time plays a role in this”.
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Originally published as Analysis: How did most-talented Boomers squad assembled bomb out of FIBA World Cup?
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