The Adelaide 36ers have told each other some hard truths before responding in style to heap more pressure on the Perth Wildcats with their 89-78 victory.
In the other NBL match on Saturday, South East Melbourne Phoenix made it three straight wins, beating the Bullets 96-73 as Alan Williams led the way against a side looking lost without the suspended Aron Baynes.
In Adelaide, the 36ers responded to a disappointing loss on Thursday night, also at home to the Phoenix, and handed the Wildcats a third straight defeat with their 11-point win.
Sitting in bottom spot with one win from five games coming into the macth, the players got together to draw a line in the sand.
It certainly worked and their effort, energy and desperation was dramatically improved against Perth, but so was the execution and a focus on getting Isaac Humphries more involved inside.
He put up 26 points and eight rebounds in a match-winning performance but the shortening of the rotation to use just eight players from coach CJ Bruton worked too.
"We met as a playing group yesterday and talked through a lot of stuff," Humphries said.
"We just wanted to come out today and put into action everything we talked about.
"We executed what the coaches needed from us tonight and we executed what we, as a playing group, wanted to execute as well."
A third straight defeat for the Wildcats has them struggling at 2-4 this season.
Coach John Rillie is focused know they aren’t playing well and the improvement needs to start offensively.
"We're not playing good basketball at this point in time," Rillie said.
"An area we need to improve on is our offence. That's where we have to find some type of rhythm and we've yet to do that in these last couple of games.
"The game's played at both ends and you need to find a rhythm to generate some natural enthusiasm, and we haven’t been able to do that for good stretches."
Brisbane coach Justin Schueller always knew losing his superstar centre Baynes with a five-game suspension was going to be challenging, but that was magnified on Saturday night.
Williams produced 21 points and six rebounds for South East Melbourne but Brisbane will still be without Baynes for next weekend's double-header away to Perth and at home to Tasmania, and he needs to find some answers.
"We've got to have solutions right now for two more games without Banger (Baynes) and that's the thing that's sitting right in the front of my head, but scoring 73 points isn’t enough to get it done in this league," Schueller said.
"Then giving them 96 is way too many as well so we have a lot of stuff that we still have to work on."
