Basketball: Hawks side sink depleted Mariners

Matt Fullerton was second top scorer for Tauranga City Mariners in their last-round defeat to Hawke's Bay development. Photo / Andrew Warner

An under-strength Tauranga City Mariners side suffered their first defeat in the SAS Sports CBL season when they lost 81-75 to the Hawke's Bay Development side in Napier on Saturday.

Due to many reasons, including a graduation, work commitments and a player's wife giving birth, the Mariners were able to take only seven players on the tough away trip to take on a full-strength roster of 11 Development Hawks.

A week earlier the Mariners had beaten the HB side 104-59 at Tauranga's QEII Stadium.

Mariners coach Neil Fullerton said missing key players made it particularly tough to win, especially nearing the end of the game.

"We were chasing the game at that stage. We were 11 points down with about two-and-a-half minutes to go, and while we pulled it back to four points at one stage with 30 seconds to go, the guys were a little bit tired at that stage. We were missing our three point guards in Ross Taurima, Jaden Bezzant and Mike Rodriguez.

"We just made a couple of errors and turned it over so just ran out of time basically. They had a couple of extra senior players from their NBL roster, from the week before when they came up to us, and they settled their team down.

"Basically we are a shooting team but our shots were not going in, particularly our outside shooting, so we needed to look at other ways to score points. We did a little bit there, with Ashton [McQueen] getting quite a few points off the fast break, and Matt Fullerton was able to score some points."

The SAS Sports CBL league will take a break this weekend, with the 2014 Under-23 National Championships finishing up with finals on Saturday at Tauranga's ASB Arena.

The Mariners remain top of the table on goal difference from Hawke's Bay. They have a double header to follow during the weekend of August 30-31, with an away game at St Peter's School against the Waikato Pistons on Saturday, followed by a home clash at QEII Stadium against the Gisborne Rising Suns on Sunday.