The Brisbane Bullets horror season has continued this week, finding themselves on the wrong end of a 116-67 loss Tuesday against the Sydney Kings.
This 49-point thrashing was good for the biggest win of the NBL’s 40-minute era, the equal-second biggest win in Sydney’s history, as well as the Kings’ largest-ever road victory.
Sydney dominated Brisbane the whole way, not scoring less than 24 points in any quarter, while the Bullets only managed to score over 20 points in one, with 21 in the first.
The Kings’ frontcourt led the charge, with Xavier Cooks and Tim Soares each scoring 20 points, but it was mainly a family affair, six Sydney players in double figures with Justin Simon, Dejan Vasiljevic, Derrick Walton Jr, and Angus Glover joining Cooks and Soares.
But the Kings dunking on the Bullets did not end with the final whistle, with one player, in particular, quick to take to social media to continue the onslaught.
🫣🫣🫣🫣!!!! WAS NEVER JD’s FAULT!!!! I hope ownership (who were courtside) realized COMMON DENOMINATOR 🥱🥱 https://t.co/C4wV5JLArT
— Dejan Vasiljevic (@3jvasiljevic) January 11, 2023
Dejan Vasiljevic, fresh off of dropping 11 points, four rebounds, and two assists on the Bullets, hopped on Twitter and quote-tweeted NBL announcer Corey Williams's tweet, claiming that the Brisbane ownership were at fault for the team's floundering efforts.
Williams’ original tweet suggested that the league should demote the Brisbane Bullets to the lower-tier league the NBL1, and Vasiljevic followed this up by defending former Brisbane coach James Duncan, and pointed at ownership as the “common denominator.”
After the game, Brisbane player Jason Cadee summed up the team's current mentality, saying that the Bullets simply aren’t good enough at present.
“We’re trying to find who we are and what we are, and right now we have no idea,” Cadee said.
“Sometimes I ask myself ‘how did we get here?’ There’s a lot that’s gone on and you’re trying to find positives.
“I’m trying to seek answers, I’m trying to help fix things, I’m talking to (Greg Vanderjagt) and we’re trying to work through stuff.
“It just goes from one point in the game where it goes from being a two or three point game and we’re right in amongst it, and it goes to 15 in the space of two minutes… we’re not good enough at the moment to be able to give up leads like that and find our way back in it.
“We owe the people that show up. We owe them a better performance than tonight. How do we do that? We have to keep working hard.”
The Bullets are currently 5-16, and sit comfortably second-last on the NBL ladder, in front of only the 2-19 Illawarra Hawks.
The Kings, on the other hand, are 16-5, good for the top spot in the league, and looking in good shape to potentially win back-to-back championships.
