Preston 71 v Manchester Kings 43

The scheduled away fixture became Preston 2's first home fixture due to Kings having problems with their home court. The fear was that another game would have to be cancelled and the beginning of our season would become disjointed. Fortunately the league came through with refs at the last minute and we had a chance to kick-start our season.

The atmosphere felt right immediately. The warm up was intense and high quality and it helped us come out of the traps at a frightening speed against a Kings squad which had had a disjointed and shortened warm up. We weren't to know it at that point, but the huge gap opened in this quarter would win us the game as we piled in 26 points with the Kings finding very few ways to slow us down and few ways to score short of hopeful pop-shots from distance.

We had our only tricky period at the beginning of the 2nd quarter where the points began to dry up and the game became closer but it was rectified quickly and we continued to score freely for the rest of the game in the style we really want to identify us this season: fast pace, but in control. We were too athletic, fast and dominant for an undersized Kings team and our key scorers in this game: Pauli, Nathaniel and Ewan made the most of the opportunity, pouring in over 50 points between them. Hopefully is a blueprint for how we want to perform moving forward this season. A joy of a game to be involved in.

MVP: Nathaniel. Huge on the boards with aggressive finishing saw our young centre really dominate a game as we knew he would this season.

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