JackJumpers dominant in Playoff decider
Milton Doyle produced an MVP level performance, Jack McVeigh hit a new career high and the Tasmania JackJumpers beat the Perth Wildcats 100-84 to advance to the NBL Championship Series.
In just their third season in the NBL, the JackJumpers are now into a second Championship Series as they booked in a meeting with Melbourne United with Wednesday's 16-point Game 3 win at Perth's RAC Arena.
Rightfully it was a proud Tasmania coach Scott Roth afterwards.
"Our experience of these moments was hugely important coming in here to keep our composure," he said.
"I thought we were just on point in a lot of areas and to say I'm proud of them would be an understatement.
"This is a win for Tasmania, a place that we love and we defend the island for them, and there's 500,000 there who were cheering for us tonight and we felt that energy."
Tasmania lost the Game 1 to the Wildcats back on Friday night in the same building, but responded in Hobart on Monday despite the absence of suspended centre Marcus Lee.
Trying to close the deal in hostile territory was always going to be a challenge, but the JackJumpers were cool right from the outset and it was Doyle who took control in the second quarter.
He scored 13 of his 24 points for the game in that period to go with nine assists which saw the JackJumpers turn into half-time leading 52-43.
Doyle added another seven quick points to open the second half and then a couple of three-pointers from fellow All-Second Team member McVeigh (27 points, 4-of-5 from deep) saw the lead out to as much as 17.
There was no let up from the JackJumpers with development player Sean Macdonald (nine points, five assists) showing how good he already is with a couple of big shots to start the fourth period.
Tasmania were back up 16 with seven minutes to play and went on to win by that margin to book in a best-of-five Championship Series match up with Melbourne starting Sunday.
On top of what Doyle and McVeigh did for Tasmania, Will Magnay came up huge once more with 18 points and nine rebounds while fellow big man Lee added eight points and two blocks.
Four-time MVP Bryce Cotton finished with 21 points for Perth, but Tasmania did a tremendous job denying him the ball to limit him to nine shots and seven free-throws.
Hyrum Harris was the only other Perth player to reach double-figures with 13 points with Tai Webster, Kristian Doolittle and Next Star Alex Sarr all scoring nine points.
Game one hero Keanu Pinder went scoreless for the Wildcats on four shot attempts in almost 20 minutes of court time as Perth's season ended on their home floor in front of just 7467 fans.
Upon reflection, Wildcats coach John Rillie felt the game two loss is where their chance slipped.
"It's not tonight's game, it was game two where we had a great opportunity to go down there and win the game," he said.
"It's easy to reflect on tonight's game and mull through all of that, but when you have an opportunity to wrap up a series, you need to wrap a series up.
"We missed a little bit of an opportunity down there especially with the way we started that game."
HUNGRY JACKS NBL PLAYOFFS GAME 3
PERTH WILDCATS 84 (Cotton 21, Harris 13, T Webster 9, Doolittle 9, Sarr 9)
TASMANIA JACKJUMPERS 100 (McVeigh 27, Doyle 24, Magnay 18)
BOX SCORE
