Fighting spirit shines despite JackJumper blows

A team with less heart could have thrown in the towel on Thursday night but not the Tasmania JackJumpers despite losing Majok Deng and Bryce Hamilton as they showed there's still life left in NBL26 yet.

The JackJumpers arrived in Sydney already rocked by the news that they would be without captain and inspirational leader Will Magnay for the rest of the season after he suffered a foot injury late in the game in Perth on Saturday night against Melbourne United.

That left Deng and Josh Bannan to hold down the front court, but then all of a sudden Deng took a nasty fall in the opening minute of the game against the Kings and suffered a concussion ending his night early.

Then to make matters worse, Hamilton injured a knee during the third quarter ending his night early and at that point, the JackJumpers were down 18 and things could have really got ugly.

Before getting to the fight Tasmania showed, Roth gave the update he had on both Deng and Hamilton straight after the game.

"He's (Deng) in there obviously and the doctors are monitoring him, and obviously he's been concussed but it's not my area of the degree of that, but obviously it was scary," Roth said.

"It scared all of us and he's up and about a little bit in there, but it's going to be a bit probably.

"We have two or three guys carrying something and he's (Hamilton) one of them who has had a rib issue and now it's a knee but I don’t know what the status will be with him."

When you consider that if you add in Sean Macdonald to Deng, Hamilton and Magnay, that's four of the team's most important players absent away from home and against a team that is playing as well as anyone in the league right now, there was plenty against them.

However, what coach Scott Roth has preached from the moment the JackJumpers came into existence was the grit and grind, and representing Tasmania with pride and that's exactly what they did in the fourth quarter.

The JackJumpers were even able to send an almighty scare into the Kings getting the margin back to single figures and even if they couldn’t quite complete the win, there was a lot for coach Roth to be proud of.

"It's the grit and grind, and I told them (players) that after the game and I'm obviously super proud of them," Roth said.

"It was ugly, it looked ugly and we played ugly, and if we'd lost by 30 no one would have said much about it other than they're hurt and so forth, and I've seen a lot of teams over the course of the season that have just gotten whacked and given in very quickly.

"Our guys continued to fight and it's a character builder, you get some humble pie and then you just kinda move on and we've gotta regroup quickly, and reload again, but our fight's real and we'll continue to fight the rest of the way out."

Given how nasty of a fall Deng took to the floor under the basket after being fouled in the first minute of the game, understandably everyone on the JackJumpers team took some time to settle after that.

However, once they saw that he was relatively OK back in the locker room at half-time, they were able to focus in on the job at hand and Roth especially saw good signs from a career-best 23-point performance from David Johnson.

"We never got the game on our terms at all and we were obviously struggling from the beginning, we had multiple turnovers right away that kinda got us shook and then Majok Deng's fall scared the hell out of all of us in general with us thinking what's next," Roth said.

"At half-time I didn’t go off with them, I just said we had to hit the reset button and clear our heads, and try to understand that Majok's OK, he's sitting here with us and we have to get back to doing what we do and get back to some basics.

"Our guys continue to fight and I'm quite proud of them and those were good signs with what DJ was able to do in that second half especially if Bryce is unable to play, that shows that he's finding rhythm.

"He is our most talented player and I've said this from the beginning of the year, and we always thought he would be an X-factor and he started slow with the injury of almost 12 weeks.

"He's kinda been up and down since then, but that was a good sign from him tonight to get some shots and minutes under his belt."

The task doesn't get any easier for the JackJumpers as they now have a super quick turnaround to returning home on Saturday to play host to the defending champion Illawarra Hawks at MyState Bank Arena.

Both teams are now locked in a fight over that sixth position and for the JackJumpers, trying to go to battle with the twin towers from the Hawks of JaVale McGee and Sam Froling without Deng or Magnay themselves is going to be an almighty challenge.

"We've just got to get home, get some recovery and get ready because they're a super talented, big team and we're going to have to make some adjustments and see who's alive to play this game at the end of the day," Roth said.

"But we'll show up and do our best at home and work as hard as we can, and we have some things that we can do very well still but we just won't have any time to practice with a small line-up and actually execute anything since we've got back from Perth.

"We'll have to put our coaching hats on and maybe I'll have to call Goorj and have him actually come down and coach my team, who would probably be helpful."