Harvey: "It's on me"

Tyler Harvey has vowed to make sure the Illawarra Hawks don't leave too much work for their second unit moving forward, after the ladder leaders suffered a jolting loss in Cairns.

There were no signs of the Hawks missing the chance to move two games clear in top spot when they headed to Far North Queensland to play the Taipans on Thursday.

Only back on Monday night and coach Justin Tatum made it clear that his team couldn’t afford any form of complacency, and that they had no right to be given they had lost at home to the same Snakes outfit only back on January 3.

If that wasn’t motivating enough, then Illawarra also needs to keep winning to maintain first position with just three rounds of the regular season remaining.

Not that it would factor into the thinking, but the Hawks also had a chance to take the Summer Shootout lead had they surpassed Cairns' top mark of 111 points.

The Hawks arrived fresh off a combined 56-point pair of wins over Melbourne and Brisbane at home too, including having a record 37 assists against the Bullets along with pulling down 11 more rebounds than the opposition to end up taking 11 extra field goals and shooting at 62 per cent.

All of that was virtually completely reversed from the outset in Cairns with the Hawks not having a single assist in the first quarter, having just one to half-time and improving from there for 11 in the second half.

Then there was the rebounding with the Hawks already down 15-7 by quarter-time to the Snakes, going into half-time being out-rebounded 27-19 and ending the night with Cairns winning on the boards 47-40.

All of that meant that coach Tatum was anything but happy afterwards, even if his bench unit did give them a chance as they tied up scores in the fourth quarter having earlier being down by 22.

"Our bench competed, they always have, but our first five had to start the game better, but our bench competed and we're proud of them.

"Clearly we weren’t moving the ball well enough or looking for guys that were open. We were probably just trying to find the one shot to get the guys going, and sometimes we'd think one shot would cut the deficit down from 20 to three, and guys were just looking for their shots at certain times.

"But at the end of the day they're basketball players, we get it and sometimes they black out and do certain things like that. In the second half we started sharing the ball."

After falling down 22 early in the second half, Tatum pulled most of his starters and it was a group including Davo Hickey (+11), Hyunjung Lee (+2), Lachlan Olbrich (+2) and Daniel Grida (+5) who got them back into it.

He went back to his starters to open the fourth, but didn’t stick with Trey Kell III (-11) and Sam Froling (-14) for long. It was Harvey and Todd Blanchfield (17 points, 5/9 from deep, +9) who almost shot Illawarra to the big comeback win.

Between them, they hit six threes in the final quarter for 21 of the team's 30 points, but it wasn’t quite enough. Harvey will be taking it upon himself to ensure the starters come out better next Thursday in Hobart against the Tasmania JackJumpers.

"They (bench) did their job, we didn’t do our job as starters so we'll take care of it," Harvey said.

"It's on me, I've got to get the starting five going to start the game. It's not the coaching staff, it's not the bench; it's on me to get those guys going early on in the game.

"We have to realise just how important the start is because the game will flow off how we start and I didn’t do a good enough job getting us ready for that. The coaches did and it won't happen again."

With a whole week to stew on the second straight loss to open 2025 to the bottom-placed Taipans, the Hawks do remain on top at 17-9 ahead of the Sydney Kings (16-10).

Harvey will do what he can to make sure it's a marked improvement next Thursday.

"Collectively as a group we just all have to look at ourselves in the mirror and figure out how we want this season to end, and go from there," he said.

"We have a week to let it sit so it could be a good thing."