A Loss?.....

After about two months of not experiencing the feeling of a loss, the Lightning finally had that feeling after this past weekend. More on that in a minute, but I'll start with the victory we picked up on Friday night. There isn't much to say about this one. This would probably been somewhat boring for someone just sitting in the stands. We ended up winning by about 20, it's just that there wasn't much happening in this game and the other team was not very good. I will say that it was absolutely freezing in the gym where we were playing (away game). I walked in before our game and didn't take off a jacket until the starting five had to walk out on the floor for the tip off. This isn't the first time that this has happened. I've come to figure out that most homes and other places in Australia do not use central heating (even as I'm writing this I'm sitting by a little heater in the living room where I'm staying at). Apparently, it just doesn't quite get cold enough for a long enough time here for people to really consider needing (or wanting to pay) for heat. Instead, people just really pile the clothes on and bundle up at night. Right now during the day it warms up to about 65 to 70 degrees (great), but at night it goes down to about 40 (not good). Obviously, at night...no heat...it gets a little nippy. As you can see, this comes in to play when all our games are after the sun goes down. 

Enough of that, on to the game that we lost. As I mentioned, this was the first time that we have lost since the end of March. It's quite disappointing that we lost, but also in the way that we played and that we beat this team by 35 the time before. I could get into a lot of reasons about what happened, but basically our defense wasn't there as it has been before (a long with some offensive issues). That said, a lot of credit to the other team, who I thought was very much improved and shot the ball extremely well. We are still sitting on top and in good position, but we MUST look at this loss and improve on some areas that we haven't been doing very well as of late. Hopefully, we will do just that starting tonight at practice.