As his London Lions side go looking for a seventh victory of the season against Bristol Flyers on Wednesday, coach Nikhil Lawry is looking forward to meeting the West Country side.
“The game will be interesting as this is the game of test coaches live for” he said. “This is the kind of test coaches live for. They’ll make adjustments and so will they, so it’ll come down to in-game coaching. It’s the third time in a short period of time that we’ve met them, and it’s like an NBA series, so it should be an exciting game.”
It was only last Friday that the sides met at the Copper Box with Lawry’s team finishing strongly to win 79-66 and they completed a successful weekend with a 69-54 victory against Sheffield Sharks. Understandably Lawry was pleased with the weekend’s results:
“It’s always a good weekend when you pick up two wins. I think the players really locked into out game plan, especially against Flyers. They heavily out-rebounds us in the previous game, but we did a much better job on the offensive glass. We wanted to throw something different at Marcus [Evans] and Malcolm Delpeche, and they both coughed the ball up four times which allowed our offence to get going.”
Lions go into Wednesday’s game on a run of four straight wins - the first of which came with a 77-74 BBL Championship success agaunst Flyers at the Copper Box - which has seen them take a firm hold on second spot in the BBL table. Meanwhile Flyers are in eighth place with an 8-11 record and are battling it out with Plymouth City Patriots and Newcastle Eagles for the final two play-off spots.
Point guard Evans leads the scoring for Andreas Kapoulas’ Flyers team with 16.3 points and dishes out a team-high five assists per game along with pulling down four boards. Trajon Jacob collects a 7.2 rebounds per game, adding 15.6 points, 3.6 assists and a couple of steals while Delpeche adds 13.6ppg, a team-high 7.5 rebounds and 1.8 assists per game.
As well as having recoded home and away BBL Championship wins against the Flyers, Lions also overcame Bristol in the BBL Trophy semi-final, winning 81-61 on the road before edging home 85-81 at the Copper Box to complete a 166-142 aggregate victory. Lions also recorded a pair of victories against the West Country team in the BBL Cup group stage as a dominant first half paved the way for a 90-80 success at SGS College Arena before Lions came from behind to win 94-85 in the return.
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