Well we did it. We came through that huge weekend with wins over Chester and Milton Keynes to make it 11 on the bounce.
I thought it was an exciting weekend, certainly a challenging one and also very interesting from the tactical and coaching points of view.
Against Chester, you saw us go in ten points down at half-time and you saw the players were later than usual back on court. From that you can work out a few things were said in the locker room.
Basically, I told them that was the worst rebounding performance in 20 minutes that any team I have ever coached had put on. I thought our big men got completely outplayed. I got a little personal with some of those guys. They are good players. They don't need to back off, they need to take the ball through because those Chester guys are tall and long but not that strong.
I thought they were playing scared and you saw in the second half the difference in attacking the basket by Rico, Sterling, Wil and also Errol and Emiko. They really started getting in there. It was a great adjustment, a great second half.
I was also very, very happy to see us play defence that way against a team of that calibre. The most impressive thing was holding them to 27 points in the second half. Almost every time we played them last year they had a 30-point plus quarter where they just exploded on us.
I thought we wore into them big time. They used a lot of energy in the first half which surprised me. I thought they would sit back but they came out and tried to play their best defence early. You could tell later on they were tired and we started turning the ball loose and playing with a lot of confidence.
After the high of that win, going to Milton Keynes the next afternoon was never going to be easy. They have changed their team around a little bit and their coach Nigel Lloyd is an experienced guy who is going to get them playing better and better. I'm just glad to get one done there and only have to go back one more time.
I decided we would really go after them early and try and bust the thing open. I wanted to make a little statement to them, which is what happened. We ran out of energy towards the end, which is partly why we started fouling so much. We were half a step slower, our reaction time was not good and we couldn't get out of the way.
Obviously we play a little differently to everyone else in the league with our defensive pressure and, as the season progresses, teams are preparing for that. They start the games pretty well because of what they have prepared but we make our adjustments too and change our presses. It's tough to have guys chase you that hard all the time like we do. You are eventually going to cave in.
It happened at Milton Keynes. I said to my assistant Steve Swanson early on: "They are making perfect plays but pretty soon it's going to break down and we're going to take it from them." That's what happened.
The weekend was a really good test for us mentally, to see us play that badly in the first half against Chester and recover to play very well, then to hang on through some adversity late on at Milton Keynes, which is a tough place to win.
This month was always going to be huge. We've now got two games left and we can stay first in the league, we've already hit the cup semi-final and we can get to the trophy semi by December 1. That's pretty good going. Let's see if we make it.
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