But according to South East Melbourne coach Josh King, who was a special guest on Tuesday\u2019s NBL Now Roundtable, Matthew Dellavedova has been the Harbour City side\u2019s most important player.<\/p>\n
\u201cSydney’s a very deep team. We can sit here and talk about KD, but they have a lot of high-level players on that roster that can hurt [you],\u201d King said on NBL Now.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can’t just focus on KD. That’s the problem. KD does an excellent job of getting his other players involved.<\/p>\n
\u201c[One of those is Matthew Dellavedova], who\u2019s been very important and probably they\u2019re second-best [performer] right now.<\/p>\n
\u201cDelly does just as good a job as anybody in the league covering Bryce, but they\u2019re posting Delly up on Bryce on the offensive end, which is wearing down Cotton.<\/p>\n
\u201cKD\u2019s been amazing, but you take Delly off this Sydney team, I don’t know if they win this Series. He\u2019s a huge part of what they\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stats back up NBA champion Dellavedova\u2019s impact, too, with the guard being +36 plus\/minus for the Series, highlighting the impact he\u2019s having on the game when on the hardwood.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s praise for Dellavedova, alongside fellow NBL Now panellists Kelsey Browne, Pete Hooley and Lanard Copeland, echoed the sentiment of his coach Brian Goorjian, who called the 35-year-old an \u201cAustralian icon\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The other Kings star the panel wanted to highlight for getting the franchise to within one game of a sixth title is NBL23 MVP Cooks.<\/p>\n
\u201cXavier Cooks is one of the league’s MVPs, and has been unbelievable this Series on both ends [of the floor],\u201d Hooley said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe always seems to be in the right spot and his length and athleticism [cause issues] on defence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Game 4 of the Championship Series tips off at 7.30pm AEDT on Wednesday at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, live on ESPN and 10 Drama in Sydney and Adelaide.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Through the first three games of the Hungry Jack\u2019s NBL26 Championship Series, most of the headlines have rightfully…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-576138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}