Tall Blacks to go all out – Vucinic

Wily coach Nenad Vucinic insists his undermanned Tall Blacks are unfazed by a winless warmup and remain capable of causing a boilover at the Olympic qualifiers in Venezuela.

New Zealand open the 12-team tournament against Macedonia at 6am tomorrow before backing up against Angola on Thursday, with the top two teams progressing to quarterfinals.

The top three teams at the tournament snap up the remaining tickets to London and the Tall Blacks are long shots after losing all three warmup games, against Brazil, Greece and Nigeria.

Highlighting Vucinic’s plight is the fact an unavailable New Zealand starting five of Corey Webster, Kirk Penney, Isaac Fotu, Thomas Abercrombie and Steve Adams would probably beat the one he is about to roll out in Caracas.

But he isn’t after sympathy and rejected the notion his team could carry a nothing-to-lose, everything-to-gain mentality on court.

‘‘Sure, we do have all the excuses in the world that we’re not going to get through. The problem is we don’t want those excuses; we have got games to lose and we don’t want to lose them,’’ Vucinic said. ‘‘That’s how we approach every game, including those tough games. Yes, we are go- ing to go all out; what else can you do when you’re playing for the Olympics? We know that the public opinion out there is we have no chance but we don’t mind being in that situation.’’

Without a go-to scorer, the Tall Blacks’ best chance is engaging Macedonia in a scrappy, lowscoring struggle. Defensively, Vucinic said he had a ‘‘couple of things up our sleeve’’ to try to slow down last year’s European semifinalists.

Lindsay Tait will have his hands full with naturalised American Bo McCalebb, who Vucinic described as ‘‘probably the No 1 point guard in Europe at the moment’’. And, after experimenting at small forward during the warmup games, captain Mika Vukona will revert to power forward in a bid to negate Olympiacos star Pero Antic.

‘‘We really only have Leon Henry who is a specialist at that position,’’ Vucinic said. ‘‘But we most likely will play a lot more guard oriented with Mika playing at the power forward spot.’’

Vucinic said New Zealand would continue to live or die on its three-point shooting despite its disappointing 74-66 loss to Nigeria.

‘‘We’ve played like that for the last 15 to 20 years, so we have to shoot the ball well. We’re a threepoint shooting team; we always have been. We don’t really have too much in terms of a post game at this level.’’