King hopeful on Walton but backing depth

The South East Melbourne Phoenix made it seven wins from the last nine NBL games with coach Josh King proud of their variety of weapons which will help should they again be without Derrick Walton Jr.

The downside of Saturday night's win at Gippsland Regional Indoor Sports Stadium for the Phoenix undoubtedly was a second hamstring injury of NBL25 to Walton Jr.

He was playing his sixth straight game after a frustrating run of illness and the first injury, and was proving what a high quality and match-winning point guard he was.

That's why it's frustrating for King and the Phoenix that he's now hurt again, but the coach is remaining hopeful it's not as serious of a hamstring injury as they fear.

"It's his hamstring, is what I've been told, and we won't know until they actually test it but anytime you have soft tissue it's not good," King said.

"You always expect the worse but hopefully it's better because he's been playing really well and has elevated the level of our team. Hopefully the injury's not as bad as we think it could be."

For a lot of Saturday night's game it was fascinating to see Josh Bannan leading the Bullets up one end with his work down low and then Matt Hurt proving unstoppable up the other.

When King and the Phoenix identified that Hurt was having his way, they wanted to keep going to him and the result was his 32 points and 12 rebounds on 14/20 shooting.

"We go into the game and we're going to take whatever the defence gives us so if it's Joe getting 10 spot up threes, then he's going to shoot the 11th," King said.

"Matt had it going and they were allowing him to get open opportunities and obviously he's a really good scorer. He's tough to stop and we kept feeding him, he was open and he was the guy who got the ball to score."

Nathan Sobey has been playing a selfless role during South East Melbourne's emergence this season, and once Walton wasn’t coming back, he picked up the slack.

There's no doubt there was added motivation given how badly he wanted to beat the Bullets for the first time.

He finished the game with 31 points, seven assists and five rebounds with 4/8 three-point shooting, but it wasn’t on the back of any specific King direction.

"I mean Sobey's a really good player, he's our captain and is our most veteran player on the team so I'm sure he took that upon himself a little bit," King said.

"It wasn’t actually a meeting where we said that he had to go get 31, but he stepped up and helped the team.

"That's what I really like about this team, it can be anybody's night and tonight it was Matt and Sobey a lot, but then Joe came in and really hit some big shots and I liked the physicality he played with in the second half too especially defensively on Cook where he did a really nice job to contain him."

King continues to be delighted how Joe Wieskamp has responded to what was a make or break moment for him when the coach didn’t put him on the court at all during a loss in Perth back on November 15.

If Wieskamp didn’t take that the right way, he might not even be still with the Phoenix right now. Instead he took it on the chin, got back to work and focused on doing the things King wanted of him.

South East Melbourne has won seven of nine games since, and Wieskamp has delivered 11.6 points a game in that stretch.

It's even more magnified in the past four games where Wieskamp has gone for 16.3 points including a crucial 16 in Saturday night's win over the Bullets with King suitably impressed.

"It's not easy to get a game where you don’t get to play especially a guy that we know the level that Joe can play at, but he's responded well," King said.

"He's responded like a professional and he's handled some adversity. It's really fun to watch guys kind of get over a hurdle and he was a big spark for us in this game and hopefully he continues to be moving forward."