When you're a three-point shooting team, there'll be times that it deserts you and that happened in a massive way for the South East Melbourne Phoenix in Throwdown 33 but facing some adversity now is something Josh King feels could be good for his group.

There are plenty of new faces with the Phoenix for NBL27 including imports Skylar Mays, Yannis Moris and D'Shawn Schwartz along with Tanner Krebs, Dash Daniels and Hunter Goodrick.

So any team has to go through a degree of adversity and King is looking forward to seeing how his group responds after scoring just four points in the fourth quarter on Thursday night in the eventual 25-point defeat at John Cain Arena to Melbourne United.

They had started the season well with a big win in Perth and tight loss in Tasmania, but went 4/41 from behind the three-point line in the Throwdown with the tone set with a 0/10 first quarter, and it never really improved.

That included Mays going 2/7, Krebs 0/2, Nathan Sobey 0/6, Schwartz 0/6, Daniels /17, Glover 0/6 and Akech Aliir 0/4.

King has no idea what was behind the performance or indeed even if there was a reason for it when he was reacting straight after the game.

"We weren’t our best tonight and I want to apologise to the fans, it was a great crowd and we'll be better I know that," King said.

"What do I think led to that? I could make every excuse under the sun why I think we shot 4/41 from three, it was a bad shooting night that I haven’t seen in the two-plus years I've been here.

"It's by far our worst performance and we picked a bad night to do it, but I can't pinpoint why other than giving Melbourne United a little bit of credit for that.

"I think we had a lot of really good looks that for whatever reason, maybe nerves from guys that haven’t played in John Cain before, but a lot of guys that have also didn’t shoot the ball well. I can't pinpoint an exact reason why we didn’t shoot the ball well tonight."

Looking at the big picture, King feels maybe his team was listening to some early hype too much about the Phoenix being pumped up so now dealing with some negative talk about them following the 25-point loss might not be the worst thing in the world.

King never judges a team he coaches until they face some sort of adversity so now he'll find out with this team of NBL27 with their next game back in Perth next Friday night.

"I just told the guys in the locker room that this will be good because instead of people saying it's South East Melbourne Really Good, it's South East Melbourne Sucks," King said.

"Maybe that's what they need to motivate themselves but we'll see where we fall in line and I always say this that no one finds out the true character of their team until they face adversity.

"This isn’t crazy adversity, but it's a little bit of adversity, so we'll see where we're at and that's why I'm excited to see how we respond."

The easy reaction from the outside if a team has a night of shooting 4/41 from three-point range might be to put the long ball a way for a little while and try to find another way to go on the attack.

But for King, that would be admitting defeat about the play style and game plan he has put in place, and after just one game that would be the worst possible idea.

So instead, King will be backing in his group to keep shooting the three ball and there's every likelihood they deliver a hot shooting performance next time they step out onto a floor.

After all, with Mays, Krebs, Sobey, Schwartz, Glover and even big man Jordan Hunter who did go 1/1 in the Throwdown, they have all proven they can shoot the ball at a good clip so King will continue to back them in.

"We're gonna continue to shoot threes, Andrew Gazey asked me at half-time what do you tell your team, and I just said to keep shooting," King said.

"Shooting is confidence so I'm not going to go in and scrap our offence and tell them to stop shooting threes because we had a horrendous game.

"I remember they had a game last year where they went 0/29 from three so you have to keep shooting the ball and I believe in the shooters that we have. We've got really good ones and we'll bounce back from this."

Chris Pike

King apologises but excited for SEM response