“We’re Not a Good Team”, Declares Wildcats Coach

Perth Wildcats coach John Rillie has boldly declared the ‘Cats are “not a good team” at the moment following another disappointing loss.

The Wildcats failed to deliver in Thursday night’s 85-77 loss against the Tasmania JackJumpers, Perth’s fifth loss in a row. It’s the first time the Wildcats have lost five in a row since January 2005.

“Right now, we’re not a good team when we show up on game night,” Rillie said.

“We’re not a good basketball team when we get critiqued the heaviest. We’re going to keep chipping away at this. I believe the work ethic behind the closed doors gets rewarded at some stage.

“We’re doing a great job of practice. It’s just keeping that belief of where we’re trying to get to

“At our end it was tough to score some baskets so we couldn’t put any scoreboard pressure on them at all. The team is disappointed in the way that we play.”

A disheartened captain Jesse Wagstaff said the team can’t pinpoint one problem to fix, saying they’re “consistently inconsistent”.

“It’s frustrating it’s not the same thing, if it was always one thing it’d be easy to fix, but it’s consistently inconsistent,” Wagstaff said.

“I think we’ve got enough to get it done, but we’re not getting it done right now.”

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The Wildcats have snowballed down to eighth place with five losses and only three wins.

Perth is struggling to reflect their performance from practice to game day on court, according to both Rillie and Wagstaff.

“Anyone that was at practice yesterday, we had a great practice, you’re putting drops in a bucket and that’s gonna pay dividends at some stage,” Rillie said.

“I’d echo what JR (Rillie) said, I think we had a really good practice yesterday and I said in the last presser, it’s kind of consistency…we’re high we’re high, we’re low we’re low,” Wagstaff said.

Bryce Cotton was the standout for Perth, recording 26 points, 6 assists and 5 rebounds. Cotton is also now first in the league in scoring averaging 22.3 points per game.

The Wildcats are headed to the Adelaide Entertainment Centre to play the Adelaide 36ers on Saturday at 8:00pm AEDT.