I have been up in Brisbane this week to meet a client and went along to the game. Not really very pretty from the Sixers perspective. Their defence was largely horrible while the Bullets played very well at both ends. Rucker got going and was automatic from outside and Black was getting a lot of easy scores inside.
Sixers did very well (somehow) to post 109 points against the Bullets defense. I have no idea how because sometimes it looked like we had no chance of scoring. Reesy was good (hit a three!), Holmes was shooting well early, Mackinnon had 4 quality dunks, etc. I, personally, thought we had a long shot at winning it in the fourth but Phil 2-3 times subbed the full bench! The second time, Oscar had just hit two threes in a row and they all came off - the margin had come near 10 points and I wondered if we could've reeled it in a bit more.
We lost the FG% by 10% and realistically lost the boards by 10 too (our count was a bit inflated - there was a patch where Cooper got about 3-4 ORB in a row trying to make tip-ins).
Venue is pretty good and very well located (walked there from our accommodation, which you wouldn't do with the Dome!). Entertainment was up and down. Mascot came out on a low-rider (zzz) and later tried to fire out t-shirts from a cannon which didn't work, but the kids near us were on their feet waiting to catch something and yelling out. First-quarter and third-quarter breaks were the Scream Team who I thought were awesome. Brief performances but brilliant. Half-time were some little kids dancing to Thriller for about 5 minutes which was ho-hum, and then a shooting competition of some sort and a competition involving two guys spinning around and then trying to make a lay-up which is low-tech and easy, but pretty funny.
Crowd was pretty sparse on one side (heard about people buying tickets an hour before the game and getting front-row baseline!) but they did get into it and made a bit of noise. Not quite up to the level of the Dome at a good game though.
