Brisbane Bullets to play final pre-season match against Sunshine Coast

BRISBANE get to see how far they have come in just 10 days when they take on Illawarra on the Sunshine Coast on Sunday in their final pre-season hitout before the 2018-19 NBL campaign gets underway on October 11.

The Bullets were embarrassed by the Hawks on the opening day of the Blitz pre-season tournament in Bendigo last Thursday when Illawarra ran riot on the way to a 91-69 win.

The full Brisbane squad had come together for the first time just 24 hours earlier and improved markedly in games against Melbourne and Sydney to finish the Blitz with some momentum and confidence.

The fruits of a hard week of labour on the training court will be on show at USC Stadium at Sippy Downs on Sunday.

Brisbane were part of the NBL-NBA pre-season game series 12 months ago but the Bullets stayed in Australia this year while five NBL clubs headed to the US.

Guard Adam Gibson said as good as the experience was to play against an NBA team, Brisbane’s time was better spent getting to know each other and getting to work at training with the regular season just around the corner.

“We’ve had five of our guys away with international duties and we’ve had so many guys injured in the pre-season that we haven’t really had any time together. We’ve literally had just a handful of sessions where a majority of the side has been at training,’’ Gibson said.

“We couldn’t afford to have days travelling (to the US) and we have needed to put in the work here which will be vital to how we go this year.

“Hopefully we’ll see some improvements from that first game at the Blitz. It’s not so much about the scoreboard but we want to be better at certain areas of our game.’’

Fill-in import Nnanna Egwu will play his first game for the Bullets on Sunday.