This was a hard defeat to take. Going into today's game (yesterday's by now to you) I knew it was going to be tough. Having lost one of our big men to a two week injury weakened us a bit, and Malaysia certainly seemed to have better guards than us, and they'd already won two games to our none, it seemed to me we needed to gamble a bit to have a chance.
I felt they'd go motion against us, it attacked us where we were weakest, so I felt our best option was to sell out and try to defend outside. So I went with a 3-2 defence and also used gdp. Offensively I thought they would predict inside, since it was a must win game for both of us. In the end they went with the sensible option as the stronger team and didn't predict. My feeling that they would predict is probably what cost us the game in the end.
The game itself went fairly well. We had the blow of losing Fisher to a foul out, but that wasn't a big factor as we had good backup for him. The injury was slightly more of a factor as Bertrand was having a decent game at SG.
For the most part Malaysia had the lead in the game, but we kept chipping away, and in the fourth, their star PG fouled out, and we too the lead and it seemed momentum was with us. Most of the time I think we would win the game from there. But an unfortunate run of bad shot choices led to Malaysia retaking the lead in the last two minutes, and we were unable to close the gap, in what looked a panic stricken last minute.
This one really hurt, as it looked like it was going to be a special day for us. Qualification is now impossible, though the nature of the loss was bad enough in itself.
We have a week off now, during which I'll be whinging about the game engine every time I log on.