Rough start: Can the Adelaide Lightning turn it around?

Despite a talented squad, Nat Hurst's team has a 1-4 record and are fast running out of time to make an impact in WNBL25.

Photo credit: Sarah Reed / Getty Images

At first glance, there’s plenty to like in the Adelaide squad, which boasts one of the best Australian players of a generation (Steph Talbot), a stellar talent who forced her way into the All-WNBL first team and the Paris Olympic Games squad (Izzy Borlase), one of the best young frontcourt talents in the country (Issie Bourne) and an elite defensive player and rebounder (Brianna Turner).

Coming into this year, they re-signed Tayla Brazel despite the young guard suffering an anterior cruciate ligament tear that will keep her out for at least the rest of 2024. It was an underrated loss; the fast-improving 20-year-old could have been a valuable two-way player off the bench.

Still, the Lightning came into the season with decent continuity, with four of their core players - Brooke Basham, Isobel Borlase, Issie Bourne and Brianna Turner – all playing the majority of games last season. They were also looking forward to seeing more of Steph Talbot – their leader, best player and one of the league’s most impactful wings – who had missed time after injuring her anterior cruciate ligament.

Yet, they’re languishing at the bottom of the table with only a single win over struggling Sydney to their name. So, how do they turn it around?

Given Adelaide brought back most of the team’s personnel from last season, it’s worth taking a step back to WNBL24 to gauge where the team was at entering this campaign and to shed light on the team’s rough start.

Last season, Adelaide finished second last with an 8-13 record, but a closer look at their record shows that, at times, they were more competitive than their cellar-dwelling position suggests. A run of close losses early cost them dearly; they went down by single-digit margins eight times across the season. In round six alone, they fell to Sydney by two points and then lost to Perth by three points in overtime. Had they won half of these close games, they would have been comfortably inside the top four.

Late in the season, with their finals hopes long gone, they reeled off four wins in a row, including victories over three finals-bound teams in Townsville, Southside and Melbourne. Their return to winning form underlined the influence of Steph Talbot, who had missed all but three games in WNBL24. Their record when she played? 3-0.

The Lightning started this season with a tough opponent in Bendigo, arguably the title favourites with a team stacked with high-level veteran experience. Adding to the challenge, they were again without their most influential player in Talbot.

Adelaide was competitive for much of that opening game, troubling their opponents with their ability to get out in transition (they had 10 fast break points to Bendigo’s zero and 15 points from turnovers to Bendigo’s six). Adelaide entered the final quarter behind by only two. But in what would become a damaging pattern for the team, they had a stretch where their scoring completely dried up; they only scored seven points in the last stanza and Bendigo coasted to a comfortable 14-point win.

Point guard Japreece Dean hadn’t entered the season as one of the more high-profile imports, but against Bendigo she proved she can be a star player in this league, scoring 23 points and registering three steals. But she played something of a lone hand; Bendigo had four of the five top scorers. They also had four of the top five rebounders in the contest, demonstrating their depth.

At home against Perth, they lead 20-10 in the first quarter but faded as the contest wore on and eventually went down by 14 points despite strong games from Bourne and Borlase.

Suddenly desperate for a win in just the third round of the season, Adelaide got back Talbot for their first meeting with Geelong but went down in an agonising overtime loss. Arguably, their opponents got a couple of slices of luck down the stretch. Elissa Brett’s three-pointer to tie the game up with less than three minutes left bounced high off the rim before falling in. Borlase’s jumper to win the game rimmed out, and then a long Shelley three took a shooter’s roll and sealed the win in extra time.

Yet Adelaide couldn’t simply blame ill fortune for the loss to Geelong. In a game where both sides missed their share of open looks, they only shot 36% for the game and 28.6% from three-point range. They also allowed their opponents to get 14 offensive rebounds, allowing Geelong to record 21 second-chance points (to Adelaide’s five), a major factor in the result.

The team was still winless when they met Sydney, who were themselves struggling. With Dean effective as the floor general, Turner providing stout interior defence and the team picking up easy points in transition, Adelaide led at every break and rolled to a 78-54 win.

The winning run was short-lived, however, when the team travelled to Townsville later in the round. Adelaide’s first half was outstanding, leading 40-20 against a Fire team that was ice cold on long-range shooting. But what followed was barely believable; Adelaide didn’t score in the third quarter until Borlase finally hit a fade away with 1:50 left in the period. They finished with just two points for that quarter and five points in the final stanza, allowing Townsville, who had looked completely out of sorts for much of the game, to pull off a huge comeback.

With Adelaide’s record now 1-4, where do they look to for improvement? They’re already getting top-shelf contributions from Borlase and Bourne, who aren’t just great prospects, but are already genuine stars. Aged 20 and 24 respectively, the pair may still be a few years from their peak as players. Both probably have another level of consistency and production in them, as they develop that veteran’s know-how on how to get buckets in the stretches where their favoured shots are stubbornly refusing to fall.

Another interesting player is Brianna Turner. While she has again been an elite rim protector (she’s second in the league with 15 blocks) and a ferocious rebounder (she leads all players with 12.6 per game), she has struggled with her finishing in WNBL25 with a field-goal percentage of just 30.6% after five games. It’s a particularly surprising figure given she is almost exclusively an interior player; she’s only made two three-pointers across her WNBL career. The good news for Adelaide is that Turner’s numbers suggest this is a temporary shooting slump rather than an ongoing limitation; she has a career field-goal percentage of 58.3% across 185 WNBA games.

A worrying team-wide trend for Adelaide is that they aren’t getting to the free-throw line nearly enough. Remarkably, they didn’t shoot a single free-throw in the first half against Perth, eventually finishing with seven attempts to Perth’s 20. But it wasn’t just that game where they didn’t get to the line; after five rounds, they’ve taken only 44 free throws in total this season. The next worst tally is Sydney, who have taken almost double as many free throws as Adelaide (84) in the same number of games.

While Adelaide’s lack of free throws speaks to an offence that isn’t getting enough penetration, it’s potentially also linked to their low rate of three-point attempts; only Townsville have taken less than Adelaide’s 102 attempts. With more players driving hard to the hoop and looking to finish through contact, defenders would be pulled off the perimeter, opening up more and better looks from three-point range. As it is, their offence is struggling across the board and their 67.8 points per game is the least in the WNBL.

The Lightning certainly have the potential for improvement. Talbot is still finding her way back from injury. Still, the bad news for them is that many of the teams ahead of them on the ladder have also been playing with significant injury setbacks and will only get tougher as opponents. Bendigo has been flying without two-time league MVP Kelsey Griffin. Last year’s runners-up, Perth, are again playing an entertaining and high-scoring brand of basketball and will get even more shooting when Amy Atwell returns from a knee injury. The defending champions, Southside, had a slow start to the season under coach Kristi Harrower but should improve as the talent-laden roster adjusts to a new leader.

It's hard to see a quick fix for an Adelaide team that has finished seventh the past two seasons and again finds itself at the wrong end of the standings. Figuring out what’s behind the stretches where their scoring dries up completely and finding a way to a more efficient offence will be crucial but difficult tasks. Ultimately, there’s a lot of sheer hard work ahead of them as they try to avoid another lost season and claw their way into contention in WNBL25.