NBL wrap - end of round 3

Having been in Townsville working on footage for the Members-Only Workshop section of the website, I'm a bit behind on the NBL updates.

The end of round 3 was on Saturday night last weekend. The Dragons won on the road taking care of the Hawks 114 - 95 and Townsville beat Perth at The Swamp 97 - 80.

In the first game, Cortez Groves (pictured below) seems to be settling in to his 6th man role, leading the team in scoring with 25 points on 8 of 12 shooting including 6 of 8 from downtown. Mark Worthington (even tho I really don't like him) continues his strong start to the season with 19 points and 9 assists (must have been feeding Cortez). For the Hawks, their bigmen were good, Dusty Rychart had 22 points, 7 boards and Cameron Tragardh had 19. Kavossy Franklin stunk it up from the field shooting 1 of 11 but he wasn't alone as Glen Saville shot 2 of 12.

In game 2 of the night, it was all about 200 gamer Kelvin Robertson. You look at the boxscore and it would seem that his teammates got out of the way and let him go to work. Kelvin had 27 points on 10 of 13 shooting in just 27 minutes of court-time. Rosell Ellis had 14 points, 11 boards and Cameron Tovey had 15 points, 6 boards. No one really fired for the Wildcats ... Darnell Hinson had 15 points, 5 boards and Alex Loughton had 14 points, 8 boards.

Townsville Crocodiles - Doing it for the kids

With the NBL in a "transitional" phase this season, many have commented that part of the problem over the last few years is that the league has lost touch with its grass roots. I read an article (I think by Tim Morrissey) about the death of the Sydney Kings and it mentioned the team no longer did school visits and over recent seasons they had little to do with the local community.

So, when I dropped in on the Townsville Crocodiles training session yesterday it was refreshing to see that this was not infact a league-wide trend. After the team had a full practice session, the whole organisation (all the players and the front office including the CEO) spent another two hours running a "Rookie Club" camp with about 30 local youngsters. The team played games with the kids, signed autographs and did pretty much anything that was needed to keep the kids interested and entertained.

In other notes from Crocs training session:

• Recent 200 gamer Kelvin Robertson may be short but he is a UNIT! It looks like he spent much of the off-season in the gym and has the AFL arms/guns to show for it.
• Michael Cedar may not see much court-time in games but continues to show flashes of brilliance
• Rosell Ellis plays WELL above his height
• New Croc, Brad Williamson seems to be paying hommage to John Rillie with his new buzz-cut hair style (quite different from what we were used to from Brad in Brisbane)

Thank you to the Townsville Crocodiles coaching staff (Trevor and Lyndon) and the organisation for allowing me to sit in during their practice.