Geraldton Buccaneers looking to bounce back against Joondalup Wolves

Geraldton Buccaneers are gearing up for a huge clash this weekend as they take on the third-placed Joondalup Wolves at Activewest Stadium on Saturday.

In their previous meeting just under two weeks ago the Buccs played arguably their best game of the season as a 25-point first quarter allowed them to control the clash from then on in a 91-78 victory.

They had four players in the double digits for points and shot at more than 40 per cent from beyond the arc in an all-round team performance.

Contrast that to last weekend’s game against the Perry Lake Hawks where they had just two players in the double digits and shot at 21 per cent from outside the paint and just above 30 from across the court.

The Buccs just could not get runs going and cut increasingly frustrated figures as the offence just did not seem to click as a team.

During the week Shaun Stewart said he believed the Hawks had prepared better having just played them seven days prior.

“They made some adjustment which stopped us in transition and saw us play a half-court game,” he said.

“We also just couldn’t make shots which didn’t help but sometimes you just have those games.

“We want to get those sort of games out the way now and hopefully get on a roll for the finals.”

Buccs coach Dayle Joseph said despite the performance there won’t be large changes for the weekend.

“It’s a bit hard to put a finger on what exactly went wrong in the weekend, we obviously shot poorly but we need to look at whether that was due to poor execution of plays but it just seemed like one of those days,” he said.

“We went into the game thinking if we could keep them under 80 points we could outscore that so defensively I thought we were really good.

“We didn’t score transition points like we wanted to so we’ve worked on a few tweaks over the week to make sure we can be more efficient in that regard.”

The Wolves meanwhile are coming off an 11-point win against the Warwick Senators as they dropped 33 points in a single quarter to effectively kill the game by half-time.

It moved them to 14 and four for the season and with a game in hand on the Buccs, a win this weekend will seem them in contention for first place.

Joseph noted a few changes to the Wolves’ line-up from the last time they faced off but is confident they can bounce back this weekend.

“Julian Pesava didn’t play last time and he’s averaging nearly 20 points a game and they were also without their starting point guard,” he said.

“But we assumed they were going to play last time so we will be going in with the same sort of prep from the last clash.”

Tip-off will be at 7pm on Saturday.