Roth's JackJumpers pride at all-time high

While their season was still alive Scott Roth wasn’t willing to reveal the full extent of his pride in the Tasmania JackJumpers of NBL26 but the way they conducted themselves against the odds might even trump the championship triumph for him.

Even though Roth has taken the JackJumpers to a Championship Series in NBL22, the championship victory in NBL24 and there's been plenty of highs, never has his pride been higher.

While he would never enjoy losing, it was hard to not be beaming with pride after Thursday night's Play-In Qualifier loss to Melbourne United given how his players conducted themselves.

"Obviously I'm disappointed that we lost, but we executed a game plan that we worked on for five days to perfection actually," Roth said.

"We said if we could be tied by the fourth quarter, we'd be in a spot where we could definitely try to win this game so that's a great credit to our guys to execute what we were trying to do.

"We basically scrapped our playbook and everything that we've done for the last year to play this game in a different way, and they did a wonderful job of slowing it down and making them quite nervous.

"They expended a hell of a lot of energy to beat us."

Roth is fully aware that if it hadn’t been for the culture established over the past five seasons at the JackJumpers that things would have crumbled with what they dealt with over the last month of the regular season.

They lost Will Magnay, Bryce Hamilton, Ben Ayre and Nick Stoddart to season-ending injuries while already without Sean Macdonald, but still they won enough to make the finals and continued to represent Tasmania with pride.

Roth didn’t want to say too much while they still had more basketball to play, but revealed his full sense of pride after Thursday night's courageous performance where his starters played 184 out of a possible 200 minutes.

Josh Bannan, Majok Deng, Tyger Campbell, Nick Marshall and David Johnson took on a game plan from Roth that they thought sounded crazy a week ago and executed it near perfectly to give them a chance of advancing.

"This has probably been the most rewarding year of my career because when you build something from scratch and you have these foundational piece of your culture that everyone talks about throughout Australia, it's good when you're winning," Roth said.

"But it's actually built for when you're losing and most teams can't sustain what we went through, and the fact we doubled down when it got really tough for us, I can't be more proud of our players and coaches.

"That was where my reward came and this is better than a championship in a lot of different ways for me just seeing the grind that took place to really just suck it up and do what we had to do to get this chance to be in the finals, and chance to play this game.

"Personally for me, it's extremely rewarding of seeing what happened and that's including our front office and everyone at the JackJumpers.

"It's always nice when it's good for ya, but when it's bad it actually shows who you are at the end of the day and when we stuck our head up, and we should be quite proud of what we did."

As for the game plan against Melbourne, quite simply Roth knew his starting five had to play just about 40 minutes each so the only way for that to be possible, was for them to slow the game down as much as possible.

That ended up looking like Campbell not even looking to start the offence until half the shot clock was gone and then the plays run were simplified, and it almost worked with a one-point margin at three quarter-time before United did pull away in the fourth quarter.

Roth got some strange looks from his coaching staff and players when he came up with the game plan, but it almost paid off in the ultimate way in the end.

"I was just pleased that we were able to execute this game plan that when I first told them what we were going to do they all looked at me like I was crazy, but they just bought in," Roth said.

"They just kept buying in every single day as we developed what we were trying to do and we only ran four plays, we scrapped our playbook and some of our defensive concepts, and for them to just buy in with that and trust our coaching staff and what we were going to do, they were wonderful in that area.

"Probably by the beginning of the fourth we should have been up one or two as well so to be in that position in this building against that kinda team, losing sucks obviously, but I'm proud of our effort."

Expanding on the plan he came up, Roth went all the way back to his time in college in the late 1980s at the University of Wisconsin to some inventive and creative things he saw, and he even tracked down some footage which kickstarted the plan the JackJumpers came up with.

"When this all transpired I had flashbacks to when I was in college and we did this thing called the Brecksville Weave where you wouldn’t shoot the ball, you'd just weave it at the top until someone would break down," Roth said.

"So I started to think about doing that while we had our two days off and then I also flashbacked to when I was watching college basketball dreaming of trying to play in the big games, and North Carolina had four corners with Phil Ford in the middle of the floor.

"We started watching tape about that in those two days seeing how we could slow the game down, spread the floor out and seeing if they would bite and come out to play with us up in those areas.

"That morphed into me thinking what could we do to slow this game down and actually put them on the back foot so it all kinda came together, the coaches bought in even though they thought I was crazy.

"But at the end of the day the players did exactly what we asked them to do and we made them quite nervous I believe."