Rocco, Norto join Batemon in starring roles

Brisbane Bullets coach Justin Schueller has been searching for 40-minute performances from his team in NBL25, and he got just about two complete ones last weekend and it was the all-round contributions that was impressive on top of James Batemon's brilliance.

For the first time all season in Round 9 the Bullets got to play two games in the one weekend after eight matches in the opening eight rounds, and they did turn out to be two strong overall performance.

While the Bullets didn’t quite complete the job in Hobart on Friday night against the Tasmania JackJumpers, they started the game on fire going 17-3 and again were six points up with 2:30 left.

While losing from there was frustrating, there was a lot to like in the performance coming into Sunday's match up with the Perth Wildcats at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre.

Even with Casey Prather a late out with a hip flexor complaint, Jarred Bairstow again out with an ankle injury and Emmett Naar, Tyrell Harrison and Josh Bannan battling illness, the Bullets produced their best performance so far of NBL25.

The end result was the 105-84 victory against the Wildcats and while Batemon's record setting 51-point performance has understandably garnered all the attention since, there was plenty more that Schueller was impressed with.

The defensive performance from captain Mitch Norton to help force Bryce Cotton to miss his first 11 field goal attempts and go 3/16 for the game was a big factor in the win not to mention his six assists on top of that.

Rocco Zikarsky also had the best performance of his 37-game NBL career with a new scoring high of 13 points along with seven rebounds on 6/9 shooting in almost 20 minutes with Harrison battling foul trouble.

Keandre Cook had a rough shooting night until three late long balls on his way to 17 points, Naar even played an important 10 minutes for three assists, and all in all Schueller was as happy as he's been after a game so far this season.

"There's performances all over the place and JB was obviously unbelievable, but I look at it the other way with how Mitch Norton impacted the game on having to guard Bryce for basically every minute that he was out there," Schueller said.

"Rocco had his best game of the year and he was able to have a real impact when Ty got in foul trouble, and he showed we could depend on him and he was great.

"Even Emmett Naar, he had been sick but comes in and holds the fort in those moments so it didn’t really matter who we put out there, everyone contributed. What it showed was that there's hope of how much we can continue from here on out."

Schueller almost got the 40-minute performance from his team he's been after on Friday night against the JackJumpers, but even though they didn't quite get that win, he felt good afterwards because of the positive signs.

That all translated into the 21-point win at home in front of a crowd of over 6000 people on Sunday against the Wildcats. What Schueller now hopes is that level of performance becomes the benchmark of this Bullets team.

"It's definitely the one we've been looking for and I felt like on Friday it was the best we'd played and we still took a loss, which was the part that hurt," Schueller said.

"But the thing we were all excited about was that we had another game to come back to and continue to try and grow on it. Perth really tested us early and challenged us at times, and I just loved our resolve in those moments.

"We need a bit of resilience too with Casey a late out, Banno and Em have been crook, and Ty didn’t practice all week. So when I look at that and we talk about through adversity comes opportunity, and JB took that fully coming back into the starting line-up.

"He set the tone straightaway and that was the real pleasing thing and to get 40 minutes of play is what we've been asking for, now we just need to keep understanding this is who we can be and continue getting better."