Taipans: "We shot ourselves in the foot"

No Taran Armstrong, no Tanner Groves or whatever else that could be used as an excuse was of no interest to Cairns Taipans coach Adam Forde after Thursday night's home loss to Perth.

After a tough first-up loss to start the season at HoopsFest to the Illawarra Hawks, without a genuine point guard, the Snakes welcomed back Kyle Adnam to open their account with a home win over the Adelaide 36ers.

They then also regained Armstrong for their Round 3 double against last season's Championship Series combatants, Melbourne and Tasmania, which saw them score two stirring victories.

They were back home on Thursday night to host a Wildcats team on a three-game losing streak and missing former Taipan Keanu Pinder, but the Snakes looked a totally different outfit without Armstrong as point guard.

They were also missing import centre Groves, and while the final three-point margin showed the Taipans weren’t far away and they did have a shot at forcing overtime with a shot on the buzzer from Rob Edwards, coach Forde was anything but happy afterwards.

"It doesn't matter, doesn't matter who's missing. The job needs to get done with the group we have. It doesn’t matter who's missing," Forde said.

"The execution was disappointing by our group and it doesn’t matter who's in or out. We had no business winning that game. We dropped the ball in this one.

"I thought our effort was lacklustre and I can't fault the guys for competing (on the scoreboard), but it's a loss that we've got to learn from and the cool thing is we get to play Perth two more times, so we can tidy up on those areas we want to work on.

"But we're not here making excuses and we're not doing anything else other than the fact that we dropped this one, and we have to review it with a quick turnaround for Sydney on Sunday."

While Forde himself is fully aware of what Perth superstar Bryce Cotton is capable of, he does have a host of new faces playing him for the first time, including import pair Edwards and Pedro Bradshaw.

They didn’t get a look at guarding Cotton in pre-season, but Forde was anything but happy with how they defended the four-time MVP, who put up 35 points.

"We let him (Cotton) get his shots and the disappointing thing about the Blitz when we played Perth was that Bryce was out," Forde said.

"That would have been a free hit, especially for the new guys to understand how he gets his looks. We made a lot of errors and he should have had a 40 piece. I've never seen him miss so many foul shots before. That's on us, 100 per cent."

Bradshaw was one Taipans player coming up against Cotton for the first time and he was coming off an impressive defensive pair of performances in Round 3, that caught the eye of the man the Defensive Player of the Year award is named after, Damian Martin.

However, Bradshaw himself reflected on at least one play where he felt he let himself down.

"I think we shot ourselves in the foot with some costly turnovers towards the end of the game, and even some defensive lapses," Bradshaw said.

"We emphasised a lot of things defensively that we wanted to do with Cotton especially, and me in particular I gave up one at 77-77 with four minutes left and they got an o-board that goes out to him.

"I had my hands down and instead of crowding him, I let him get one off and he hits it where they take the lead.

"The main thing honestly was that we shot ourselves in the foot a lot of times, and had a lot of mental lapses on both ends of the ball. Things that were crucial we didn’t take advantage of."