Fire have depth to burn Adelaide
THE Townsville Fire believe they have the depth to run Adelaide off their feet at Townsville Stadium tonight as the visitors play their fourth game in just eight days.
The Lightning have powered through the fatigue so far with a three- game winning streak across three separate states, including an 82- 72 victory over the Flames in Sydney on Wednesday night.
That has seen Adelaide ( 6- 6) move into the top four, but the Fire ( 5- 6) have already clinched the series split and would leapfrog the Lightning with a win tonight.
The Lightning have one of the most potent starting sides in the WNBL with all five players averaging in double figures led by import Nia Coffey with 16.25 points per game.
The Fire are sweating on the fitness of their top scorer Suzy Batkovic ( neck) but coach Claudia Brassard felt Townsville still had the deeper team.
“Even if we don’t have Suz, we know we can get some scoring off our bench so we’ll make sure that we try to use that,” Brassard said.
“In the first couple of games they’ve sent the double teams early at Suz and then we went to our other bigs inside and they went to work.
“I’m sure they’ll have some adjustments on that and try to make us shoot from the outside, but our shooters have been hitting shots lately so we feel pretty good about it.
“They’ve got lots of scorers so we’ve got to make sure that we do a job, especially on Coffey early, and make sure she doesn’t go off and then try to contain those guards.”
Guard Tess Madgen said the Fire had already shown they match up well on Adelaide and she was confident they could ramp up that advantage with an aggressive start tonight.
“They are coming off four games in a week so they’re going to have to try and change things up and coming up to Townsville is no easy feat for any team,” Madgen said.
“Chris ( Lucas, Adelaide coach) always changes things up defensively so we need to be ready for that and able to change the tempo of the game to suit us.
“We haven’t had the best starts, but the last home game we came out really firing so we’re going to have the same intensity from the get- go.”