Roth: "It's not pretty, but it's effective"

Scott Roth knew that the Tasmania JackJumpers' defence would give them a winning shot, if they just put together closer to a 40-minute performance.

Coming off a franchise worst 33-point loss to the Illawarra Hawks two weeks ago, the reigning NBL champions did respond strongly in a Round 5 double-header against the Sydney Kings and Adelaide 36ers.

Tasmania produced two strong first halves in both those games and did well defensively overall to hold two high-scoring teams to 80 and 77 points respectively.

That showed to Roth that the JackJumpers were capable of getting well on top against top teams and they just needed to do it for longer, which was the case in a hard-fought win over the Brisbane Bullets.

Plenty of players stepped up, with Jordon Crawford finishing with 16 points, Majok Deng 16, Milton Doyle 15, Will Magnay 13, and even Gorjok Gak had a cameo with 5 points.

"Hopefully we're creating some opportunities through our defence to get some earlier points in the first eight seconds of the clock, and creating a bit more havoc here and there by being disruptive," Roth said.

"Hopefully that's contributing to us trying to get more than 80 points and I don’t know when the last time was that we went to the line 27 times.

"It's been something we've been harping on about driving the ball into the paint and being relentless in those areas. That also continued to help us and we have room to grow, which is nice."

The JackJumpers opened up a 19-point lead during the second quarter, but that was a familiar situation to last week after they led the Kings on Friday by as much as 16 points and the 36ers on Sunday by 11.

They ended up losing both those games, so Roth challenged his group to not let it happen again.

Tasmania ended the game outscoring Brisbane 18 points to six, to improve to 3-5 and get off bottom spot.

"You have to lean into that adversity when things aren’t going well, and our guys just continue to show up and work," Roth said.

"Our work ethic is fantastic and at half-time we said we'd been in this spot two times in-a-row, and what is going to be our response for the next 20 minutes.

"I think they just found a way and made enough stops, and made enough plays. Again they didn’t drop their head and fought through some things.

"I just credit them for the last seven to 10 days for all the work they've been doing. It's not pretty, but it's effective."