King: Hurt "not getting enough attention"

Josh King and Adam Forde were in agreement that Matt Hurt deserves to be in the MVP discussion after another starring role on Tuesday, but what the South East Melbourne Phoenix coach is focusing on is getting his team better defensively.

The Phoenix continued their winning ways beating the Cairns Taipans 113-102 in Far North Queensland on Tuesday night to further consolidate a top six spot, and close in on the top four having now won eight of the last 10 games.

South East Melbourne again put up 113 points too with Hurt top-scoring with an NBL best of 33 points while Nathan Sobey scored 26 points, Joe Wieskamp 11, Angus Glover 11 and Jordan Hunter eight to go with 18 rebounds of which 12 were offensive.

It was an eighth-straight game for the Phoenix to reach 100-plus points and once again it was former Duke captain Hurt at the forefront of it all with his 33 points at a mighty efficient 14/18 shooting from the floor, 5/6 at the foul line and collecting seven rebounds.

That was just days after having 32 points and 12 rebounds on 14/20 in Saturday's win in Traralgon over the Brisbane Bullets, and for the season he's now putting up 20.8 points and 7.2 boards.

He has been tremendously consistent too with only one game in single figures scoring while he's reached at least 20 in 11 of the 23 games, and over 30 on three occasions now.

Coach King couldn’t be happier with what he is providing in his first NBL season and whether he's getting the recognition he deserves or not, he's just happy to be benefitting from his output.

"He's playing at a high, high level right now and he's a really good player, and he's just a worker," King said.

"He doesn’t say anything but just plays ball and just wants to hoop, and have fun and is there for his teammates.

"I think he's a guy that's not getting enough attention to be honest but that's OK, I know Matt and he doesn’t really care about that. He's a heck of a player and along with other guys, he's really carrying us."

The Taipans had no answers for Hurt and Cairns coach Forde was suitably impressed in not only that performance, but his whole body of work in NBL25.

"I like Matt Hurt and for me I think Bryce Cotton is the clear runaway favourite for MVP this year because he's just on an absolute burner, but I don’t think Matt Hurt gets talked about enough," Forde said.

"He's super efficient and he has been all season. He had 15, 16 at the half and finished the game with 33, and he did it all these different ways. He just goes about his business but he was just super effective all night."

In the bigger picture, South East Melbourne has now averaged 107.1 points over the last eight games but it's at the defensive end where King's focus is going to be.

After all, despite scoring 58 points themselves in the first half on Tuesday and having 18 offensive rebounds for 20 second chance points, they still trailed the Taipans by a point at half-time.

They also gave up 102 points in the end to the bottom placed Snakes so being better defensively has King's full attention as they try to navigate their last six matches to finish as high up in the top six as possible.

"We have to start playing defence for four quarters. I didn’t think in the first half we were focused and concentrated on that end, but we found a way in the second half and particularly the fourth quarter to get enough stops to ultimately get the win," King said.

"I'm really pleased with the offence and I've got nothing but great things to say with that. We took 88 shots and I never really felt like the game was out of our control or we were ever in real trouble even though Cairns kept us on our toes.

"I liked the pace and the energy we played with overall, but if we want to play longer into March and continue to play a lot of basketball games we're going to have to be better on both sides of the ball."