Melbourne driven by "be better" mantra

Melbourne United may have put in a dominant performance against the Tasmania JackJumpers to take out Game 1, but club captain and star guard Chris Goulding says the biggest intention to come out of the win is to be even better.

United entered half-time with a ten-point lead, and although the JackJumpers managed to hang around and keep the game competitive, a 28-18 final term blew the final margin of victory out to 23 points.

As a team Melbourne restricted the JackJumpers to just 13 assists for the game as they made 40 per cent of their total shots, as opposed to Melbourne’s 18 assists on 49 per cent shooting.

Goulding says despite the impressive defensive performance, United can still get better.

“We talk about being better every game, and every quarter we check in and see if we were better than the last,” Goulding said.

“We talk about it at half-time, and when we’re doing that defensively it allows a little bit of freedom offensively, because you’re getting repeat use of the ball. There were a couple of iffy ones, as there always is, but we really wanted to come out and be better as a group and get a win.

He added his side will embrace the challenge of heading to Tasmania to play in front of a likely raucous MyState Bank Arena crowd.

“I spent a lot of early years of my life there. It’s like going home,” he continued.

“We look forward to it. It’s what you want, right? An expansion team, great fans, they sell out the arena, and it’s much better than having no fans in the arena and it being quiet. We’ve experienced that before as well through Covid.

“We’ll embrace the challenge and look to go down there and be better again. We have to look at areas where we need to be better, and we look forward to trying to be better.”

The one-on-one matchup between Luke Travers and Jack McVeigh had previously been labelled as one of the impending keys to the series prior to the Game 1 matchup, and given Melbourne’s victory and his own defensive performance, it’s safe to say Travers has struck the first blow.

The young forward ended the game with just nine points, but he ripped two steals and had four blocks in a stout defensive showing.

Goulding says when Travers is as aggressive as he was in Game 1 it gives confidence to the whole team.

“He’s so talented,” Goulding said. “Even now he’s putting together some really good games, but we’re really just scratching the surface of how good he can be.

“We just want him to be aggressive, and he helps us a lot when he does that. There’s not much more to say, we just want him to be himself and we love playing with him.

“We felt it through the Illawarra Series that he just continued to get better and better on an elite scorer, and he still had a couple of little gambles tonight and Jack’s good enough to punish him when he does gamble.

“But any time it was a one-on-one and he slid, he bumped, he challenged when he got to that tonight he was fantastic.”

Game 2 of the Championship Series matchup between Melbourne and Tasmania will tip off on Friday night at 7:30pm AEDT, live on ESPN via Kayo.