Anderson excited like a little kid ahead of GF

Featured image: @jackk.visuals

Lachlan Anderson has fallen back in love with basketball so much this season that he's now giving it his full-time focus one more and he sees no reason why the Ipswich Force can't keep firing all the way to the NBL1 North championship.

A back injury not only meant that Anderson's NBL career at the Cairns Taipans never really got off the ground, but it also almost made him give up basketball altogether.

He was forced to rest his body for almost a full year because of that back, he had started a full-time sales job and even though he did return to play at the South West Metro Pirates last year, he didn’t really think he was ever going to throw himself fully into basketball again.

But the 28-year-old sharpshooter joined Ipswich this season excited at the chance to play alongside NBL veterans Lamar Patterson and Sam McDaniel along with inspirational captain Jason Ralph.

He was still working full-time at the start of the season but he was finding he'd got that love for basketball again so when Patterson urged him to throw himself fully into the game again, he bit the bullet, quit his job and now has been huge in getting Ipswich all the way to the Grand Final series.

>> NORTH FINALS | FORCE SHOCK MARLINS TO REACH GF

>> NORTH FINALS | GOLD COAST ROLL INTO GRAND FINAL SERIES

>> LAMAR LIVES EVERY DAD'S DREAM BUT NOT DONE YET

Ipswich finished the regular season in sixth position at 8-8 but have taken all before them so far beating the 12-4 Sunshine Coast Phoenix and then the 16-0 Cairns Marlins on their home floors.

Anderson delivered 69 points and 11 rebounds over those two wins too with 12/28 shooting from the outside and now he can't even hide how excited he is for this weekend's Grand Final series against the Gold Coast Rollers.

"It's so exciting and I've barely been able to sleep pretty much all week so I'm running on the high of beating Cairns and that then fanned out into the realisation that, oh my god, we're going to play a Grand Final series," Anderson said.

"My girlfriend's flying up from Sydney, my family are flying up from Sydney and it's all starting to feel a bit more real.

"It's exciting that's for sure and I'm like a little kid when it comes to this sort of stuff and just being able to have an opportunity to go and win an NBL1 championship especially from sixth place is pretty cool."

Rediscovering a love for the game

After that rough NBL24 season with the Taipans with the back injury, Anderson lasted just four games into the 2024 NBL1 North season at the South West Metro Pirates before his back gave out completely.

He played his last game on May 5 and didn’t return to the court until May 3 the following year also with the Pirates where he did play 13 games in the 2025 season for 16.1 points and 7.0 rebounds on 40 per cent three-point shooting.

But he still wasn’t as fully invested in the game as he was previously but this off-season it started to change, he signed at Ipswich and now the rest is history and he's happy to say he isn’t sure he's ever played better.

The numbers back that up too with Anderson putting up 23.7 points, 5.6 rebound and 2.2 assists this season on shooting 40 per cent from downtown on almost 10 three-point attempts a game.

"I don’t think I have ever played better, surprisingly right, and I think as I've grown and matured a big thing for me is just being able to feel good physically again," Anderson said.

"When I was up with the Taipans, I hurt my back and had an L5-S1 disc bulge and it healed somewhat, but then four games in with the Pirates the next season it completely went. I couldn’t get out of bed, I had nerve pain down both my legs and basically I was told to take a year off.

"That wasn’t just a year off basketball, that's a year off running, a year off lifting weights and I was basically done with basketball. I told a bunch of people I wasn’t playing anymore and I was working a sales job and just doing my thing.

"I came back last year with the Pirates and told coach Pat that I didn’t need to be paid that much, I just wanted to play with my friends and didn’t want there to be much pressure because if I reinjure my back at least I can say I gave it ago.

"Then when it held up and I played a decent year, I went on to play a bunch of 3x3 in the off-season and I got more confident in my game and I realised that I still loved basketball."

Fully dedicated to basketball again

While Anderson was back enjoying basketball again in the first half of this season, he was still working his full-time job at the same time as juggling playing with Ipswich in the NBL1 North.

It was only on the urging of his teammate and two-time All-NBL First Team member Patterson that he should dedicate himself fully to basketball again when he quit his job, focused on his game fully and now he has led Ipswich into the Grand Final series.

"Even the first three quarters of this year, I was working a full-time sales job, I was still working," Anderson said.

"It got to a point where I think it might have been around that week that I had 40 against Northside and Lamar came to me and said that I need to quit my job.

"He said I needed to stop messing around and needed to work out properly so after that, I quit my job and have got back in the gym to work out every day, and have got my body right and that's built my new confidence in myself.

"I realised that there was a time I wasn’t even going to play anymore and now there's a chance I'm playing this as my full-time job again. It definitely feels good that's for sure."

Stunning upset win in Cairns

Ipswich only just managed to sneak into sixth position to make the playoffs with an 8-8 record thanks to holding the season split over the Brisbane Capitals, but they had great belief having qualified.

That was even without former MVP Sam McDaniel and they went to the Sunshine Coast to open the finals and stunned the third ranked Phoenix who Anderson and his Force teammates had taken not of how much they had been talking themselves up in the lead up.

Then on the back of that, the Force went up to Cairns with a no-fear approach against a Marlins team who had become the first men's team in the entire NBL1 to record an undefeated regular season.

But Cairns had the week off to start the finals, had a youthful core with Kody and Ky Stattmann, Kobe McDowell-White, Amarco Doyle and Luca Yates.

So Anderson, Patterson, Ralph and the Force went up to Cairns just thinking how funny it would be if they ruined the undefeated season of the Marlins. That's exactly what they went on to do.

"The thing is as well with Cairns is that they had a week off, they had a strong confidence about themselves and they were very well coached and to go 16-0 is obviously a great thing," Anderson said.

"But we sort of looked at it like they would either keep running with the confidence they had or we're going to throw the first punch. We sort of knew that with their age that we had a good shot at it and it was the same with the Sunny Coast.

"They were very confident and were in the news talking about this was their year and they had all the pieces, and we looked at that and thought that at the end of the day, you still have to lace them up on that Saturday and you have to defend Lamar for the whole game.

"Then you better hope that I don’t have a big game or one of the other guys we have don't get going too because it can be very hard to stop. We knew that once we played that way against Sunny Coast, we realised this was what we can do now and we just copied it up in Cairns really."

Wanting to spoil the Marlins party

Cairns had the week off to start the finals, but had a youthful core with Kody and Ky Stattmann, Kobe McDowell-White, Amarco Doyle and Luca Yates.

So Anderson, Patterson, Ralph and the Force went up to Cairns just thinking how funny it would be if they ruined the undefeated season of the Marlins. That's exactly what they went on to do.

Nobody outside the Ipswich bubble might have given them much hope to win in Cairns on Saturday night, but that's exactly how they wanted it.

"Oh 100 per cent, we were going up there with nothing to lost and I'm a very competitive person and am someone who just wants to go for it," Anderson said.

"So getting to go back up to Cairns against a team that beat us there only a few weeks before that who were 16-0 and were feeling good, we knew that if we stayed with them there was going to be a bunch of doubt that creeps in.

"Then if we get to the end of the game, we've got a closer like Lamar and you get to a point where we're here and how are they going to respond. I don't necessarily think that they crumbled under the pressure, we just made some big shots down the end.

"The fourth quarter was a complete mismatch and that was awesome to feel. We went up there feeling no pressure and were thinking we could be playing a team about to become 16-1 and how funny would that be if we're the one to knock them off."

Always having a belief it was possible

Ipswich flew up to Cairns on the Friday in preparation for Saturday night's semi-final and had a group of supporters and sponsors with them who made sure the team knew how much they appreciate their efforts to make it that far.

But the team was far from done yet and had a great belief on the back of winning on the Sunshine Coast, and they had a belief they could put the pressure back on the Marlins who had to deal with the burden of expectation.

"We were thinking how funny would this be and if it didn’t work out, then hey, we gave it a shot and had beaten Sunny Coast and Cairns would probably win the championship if they beat us," Anderson said.

"But we just went in there on the Friday, had a focus on just having fun and our sponsors took us out to a nice dinner and told us how proud they were of us for the run we'd made so far.

"It was almost like if we lost tomorrow, they were saying thank you, and even then I don’t think anyone was thinking we were happy with what we'd done.

"We were thinking we could win this and then there's no reason next week we couldn’t like our chances in a set of games. We never felt like we couldn’t do it the whole week getting ready for the game."

Getting ready for Gold Coast juggernaut

Now having got past Sunshine Coast and Cairns, it's the Gold Coast Rollers who await the Force in the Grand Final in the rematch of the three-game series back in 2023 when Ipswich did prevail with Nathan Sobey leading them to the historic breakthrough.

The majority of players on both teams have changed since then and this Gold Coast team of 2026 is quite the offensive juggernaut having averaged 112.3 points a game through the regular season including going for 120-plus on six occasion in just 16 matches.

Then last Saturday night they put up 127 points to beat Logan Thunder by 36 points to have home court advantage in the Grand Final series this weekend.

Ipswich won't be silly to try and get themselves into a shootout with Gold Coast and try to put up 130 points to beat them as fun as that might be to try, but Anderson likes their chances if they follow the plan that worked against Sunshine Coast and Cairns.

"As fun as it sounds to shoot 40 shots for myself and Lamar each, it's definitely a slow the game down type of situation and that's what we've done the last two weeks as well right," Anderson said.

"We changed up our game plan a little bit and it's worked by us slowing the game down, and we've kept teams that score a higher amount of points to lower totals.

"The first game that we played them we didn’t have Lamar and they were up 20 I think at the half, or maybe 17 because I banked a three at half-time.

"They were just whooping us but we came back in the fourth quarter and got the lead, and then I think I threw two turnovers in-a-row and they beat us.  Then in the second game, we stayed with them the whole game and played really well, but then just sort of lost at the end.

"But that instils a bit of confidence in us that we can hang in with these guys, but we have to do it our way. A team that scores 120 points is always going to be elite but it's the same as looking down at a team that was 16-0 or a team that was 12-4 on their home floor.

"So for us it's just focusing on slowing it down but also on our game and how we're going to progress through it, and then it's obviously different playing a potential three-game series and you have to prepare yourself mentally for that."