Two teams at opposite ends of the BBL Championship table meet at Kelvin Hall on Sunday evening when Glasgow Rocks host Essex Pirates.
While the Rocks are fourth on the table with a 13-8 record, Pirates are 12th in their debut season in the competition with four wins from their first 24 games.
Rocks’ player-coach Sterling Davis – who confirmed that his team plan no roster changes before the February 28 signing deadline – doesn’t believe that Pirates will be easy opponents on Sunday:
“You have to respect how hard they play. No matter what, they are always going all out to win the game. They all play key roles from game to game and it’s hard to pinpoint just one guy with Essex.”
Glasgow have already wrapped up the season series against the Pirates having hammered them 88-54 at home in December before winning 90-78 in Essex the following month.
Rocks went down to two narrow home losses last week, exiting the BBL Trophy with an 88-87 loss against Everton Tigers before losing in the 100-93 against Championship leaders Sheffield Sharks.
Davis was a disappointed man after those losses: “On Thursday, we broke down in the second half mentally and the tigers capitalized off of it while on Sunday we could not get any stops. Ryan Patton and Tafari Toney really carried them and we didn’t have an answer for that.”
Pirates coach Tim Lewis is looking for an improvement in his team’s display when they travel to Glasgow on Sunday: “The Rocks are an experienced team that are well coached by Sterling. Each time we have played teams for the second or third time we have set ourselves targets to be better than the last game.
“The previous game saw us much improved from our first meeting in Glasgow. We will study some of their recent game tapes reassess what we did well in our last meeting and roll out a game plan to be better than we were last game!!”
Essex went agonizingly close to picking up their fifth BBL Championship victory of the season last Saturday before losing 75-70 at home against Worcester Wolves, and Lewis was relatively happy with how they performed: “We played well against the Wolves. We led for the majority of the game but let ourselves down in the fourth quarter by falling asleep on a couple of assignments. Taner Adu, Walid Mumuni and Colin Sing all performed well in the game ,”
Posted on 19 February, 2010
