Basketball: Nuggets given painful lesson in defence

No-one said it would be easy but the Otago Nuggets were not expecting reality to bite so hard.

In their first home game since returning to the league after a year out, the Nuggets were humbled by the Christchurch Cougars at the Edgar Centre on Saturday night.

Believe it or not, the 33-point shellacking could have been much worse.

The Nuggets trailed 66-32 at half-time and, with the Cougars' talented guard line of Aidan Daly and Jeremy Kench brushing aside defenders with consummate ease, the outcome looked bleak.

The Nuggets were more tenacious in the second half and stuck to their defensive assignments with the sort of resolve which had been missing earlier.

American import Tyler Amaya came to life with some nice drives to the hoop, and Riki Buckrell drilled two three-pointers to give the 1500-strong crowd something to cheer about.

But the Cougars also played a part, doing just enough to keep the margin intact.

The damage had all ready been done in a second-quarter blitz which saw the visitors out-score the Nuggets 39-16.

Coach Alf Arlidge acknowledged his side had defended poorly and had some stern words for his team at the half-time break.

"I just went in there and said, `If we are going to defend that way, it is going to be a really long season'.

"We just need to man up.

We have to bump guys when they cut to the hole, and with our one-on-one defence we were waiting until they got the ball before we played defence.

We can't afford to do that.

That's not team basketball.

"We talked before the game about how they score 60% of their points in transition but we just didn't get back in numbers."

Paora Winitana top-scored for the Cougars with 26 points but Kench was the star.

The talented point guard was too quick for most on the court and waltzed his way around his various markers to post 25 points, seven assists, four rebounds and three steals in a superb display.

It would have been a flawless performance had he not recorded a lone turnover.

Cougars centre Lionel Hopgood had the better of Antoine Tisby.

The big American spent most of the day in bed with the flu and had no answer for Hopgood's outside game.

But he was not alone.

The Nuggets just did not put enough pressure on the visitors.

The likes of Winitana and Trent Wurtz were able to set up camp on the outside before making their shot count.

Players of that calibre are not going to miss much when they have the amount of time and space they had.

And they did not miss.

The Cougars landed 13 of their 22 three-point attempts and shot above 50% from the floor.

The Nuggets' offence was every bit as ugly as their defence, particularly in the first half.

Amaya eventually top scored for the home side with 23 points but in the first half he was 2-of-8 from the floor and got into early foul trouble.

Veteran shooting guard Matt Gillan struggled to get the ball to drop as well, missing seven of his nine shots.

But he chipped in with seven rebounds and two assists, and Tisby scored 19 points and claimed nine boards.

The Nuggets' next game is against the Giants in Nelson on Friday night.

Rising Tall Black Thomas Abercrombie scored 37 points to lead the Waikato Pistons to a 96-78 over the Taranaki Mountain Airs on Saturday night, and the Hawkes Bay Hawks thumped the Manawatu Jets 118-76.