Basketball and everything in between

So last Sunday I travelled down to the Gold Coast with my father to watch the Gold Coast Blaze do battle with the Townsvillie Crocs.  My dad does stats for the Blaze so I was able to acquire a free crappy ticket five rows from the back.  It was my first trip to the Gold Coast Convention Centre.  As my dad was to cheap to pay for parking, we parked in the casino and walked across some bridge.  The stadium is great and new.  I snuck down onto the stats bench and from there parked myself in a corporate box with everybody’s favourite ex NBL team manager Big Joe.

So onto the game – I must say that I was extremely disappointed in the way that the Blaze went about their business.  They looked unimaginative on offense and couldn’t stop anybody.  Russell Hinder was a monster on the defenisve end and everybodys favourite blogger JR hit some sweet shots.  The Blaze had no answer to Corey Williams penertation and the guy who I was pleased with the most was Cameron Toovey.  In real life he is actually quite huge and was pretty bloody awesome at both ends of the floor.  For the Blaze there wasn’t a whole lot of positives to talk about.  James Harvey hit some big shots in the 4th but was pretty quiet for the remainder of the game.  The Crocs had it in the bag pretty early.  I actually think that they missed some easy opportunities that their flex offense created for them.  The final margin could have been even greater.  Another good thing to see was the coaching tactics of the Crocs.  Every time the Blaze even seemed to be getting a sniff, they called a time out and re grouped.  It was a well orchastrated win. 

Due to the fact that my father is a poor driver, we arrived later than expected.  I was hoping to catch up with JR and introduce myself before the game.  They had already entered the 15 minute pre game phase of their warm up and I thought that it wasn’t a good idea to do that.  JR then went to the bench to get a ball and I snuck across and introduced myself.  He knew who I was and he went about his pre game ritual.  I almost did the same thing with my boy Russell Hinder but I didn’t get a chance.  After the game I saw JR talking to some fans and I went up.  He told me to wait a minute and then we could have a chat.  Boy did we chat.  We talked for 45 minutes on a variety of topics.  He is an awesome bloke and the Crocs fans are lucky to have such an ambassdor.  The thing that came across strongly in our discussion is he genuinely loves basketball. 

Overall the Blaze put on a good game day produciton.  My mail tells me that bowl tickets cost around $50 per ticket!  That is super expensive.  I am not a huge fan of either of the Blaze imports, particualary Whitehead.  I can understand last season when they got him mid season and their were no other options around.  I would like to think that if they were in playoff contention that they would have given him the boot and picked up Larry Abney.  They might have had to offer Abney a lot of under the table money, but he is a huge upgrade on either of those two guys. 

So that is that.  I am currently at a public library stealing somebody elses internet connection so I better run.  I really am enjoying the fact that I am now living in civilization.  It is lots of fun.