Go Sixers!

Saturday night I attended my first Sixers game for the season with a few friends. We've had a pretty terrible season so far, and have now lost Maher, so expectations aren't real high. However, the team has won a few in a row now, and was taking on the second year South Melbourne Dragons, who were one spot below us on the ladder, so I thought we might pull through.


We started pretty well, with new import Adam Balinger doing whatever he wanted offensively. I'm with Forcey on this one, he might be my favourite Sixer ever. He reminds me a bit of Dusty Rychart - a big, fundamentally sound power forward with a nice shot, but a willingness to work hard inside. I wasn't such a huge fan of our other import Mike Chappelle - not sure if I've been scarred by the Willie Farley experience, but I'm not really into import guards who mostly just shoot the ball. And not always well.


Still, the lack of offensive firepower on the team became evident, especially with Maher out - at one point I realised of their 52 points, 27 were from Balinger, 10 from Ng, 10 from Chappelle, and the rest of the team had a combined five.

Anyway, as we went into the fourth quarter up by 20, I started explaining to Michella that if this was the NBA, Balinger would spend much of the final period on the bench, enraging his fantasy owners. Not long after though South began their comeback, eventually cutting a twenty point lead to 1 point. There were a couple of causes - the Dragons played a pretty good trap in the final period, and Davidson had a bit of trouble with it (Maher would have been handy here). Also, Heal and Ingles took over, Ingles in particular hitting two huge step back threes.

It took two made free throws with about 5 seconds remaining from Balinger to seal the deal and give the Sixers a three point win. A great game, and I'm a big Adam Balinger fan now.


A few other random notes:

Nicest jersey I saw - A brand new Boston Celtics Ray Allen
Worst tattoo - The guy who had a tattoo of Ned Kelly on his bicep. You know, the one with the bucket on his head.
Biggest disappointment - The umpiring was horrible, with the Sixers getting tackled a few times in the last quarter. You just knew a Boti Nagy column was coming on Monday.
Worst nickname - The Ninja (Darren Ng) - am I the only one who finds this borderline racist? Why not call him "Fried Rice"?

Postgame

After coffee and cake at Evida's at Henley, we weren't quite ready to call it a night, so went to McDonalds at Fulham for a Big Mac. We talked ourselves into it by remembering that it was McHappy Day, so at least we'd be helping the kids while piling on the kilos. Anyway, the Fulham McDonalds is a hole these days. Not sure if its being remodeled but it was a mess inside. So we grabbed our burgers to go, and noticed that outside there were a whole heap of cars full of young teenage men. Cruising is what they call it. Just driving around, playing music, every now and then yelling at people in other cars. I don't understand the attraction, seems pretty gay to me. But I noticed as we were driving home these people were pretty much everywhere. Mostly driving Commodores and Skylines. It's weird, I don't remember this being a big thing when I was younger. Sure, sometimes, we'd drive down to the Quix to get frozen cokes, but I don't think we ever spent the night just cruising around. Kids these days . . .