Life is a circle and the Brisbane Bullets are an endless plane. They have a negative record. Their players are injured. Their head coach is gone. Any of these statements could have been written about the Bullets of last season. They could probably be written about them throughout any point in the future. The Bullets have misfired again.

It is another season of woe and catastrophe for the Bullets. They came in with high hopes. Their leadership was to be rejuvenated with the debut of brand new head coach Stu Lash who was freshly promoted from the boardroom. The Bullets retained All-NBL First Team member Casey Prather, added former league MVP Jaylen Adams and recruited former NBA prospect Javon Freeman-Liberty. They added some quality locals too in reigning NBA champion Alex Ducas, college returnee Taine Murray and surprise Australian Jacob Holt. Lamar Patterson was even added as the most decorated nominal replacement player in history. They were complimented by the retention of Tyrell Harrison, Mitch Norton and Sam McDaniel.

I think it is often a point that is missed but the Bullets almost made the play-ins last season. Their 12–17 record was only one win behind the Adelaide 36ers in sixth and Tasmania JackJumpers in seventh. Such a small altering of success and Justin Schueller might not have been fired. That is in the past though; Schueller is out of the way and Lash is here to lead the Bullets to their destiny. It was in 2019 that the Bullets last appeared in postseason action. They were hungry. They were determined. They were going to do it.

The Bullets quickly unravelled almost on debut. Lash was revealed as not the head coach but instead essentially a chairman; he deflected to his assistants, Darryl McDonald and Greg Vanderjagt, throughout games and there were three people functioning as head coaches. Freeman-Liberty went home after two games. Dakota Mathias was brought in as replacement. Prather was ruled out for the rest of the season. Adams was released. Freeman-Liberty came back. Terry Taylor was brought in as replacement. Nobody on the team knew who they would be playing alongside each game. They probably did not even know who would be coaching them in that game. Life is a circle and the Bullets have a 5–13 record. Lash resigns.

The pessimist can say that Lash was always doomed to fail. There was genuinely no way that someone with no experience could do what other people with experience failed to do. Was Lash going to do what a curtain call of former Bullets coaches in Andrej Lemanis, James Duncan, Sam Mackinnon, Vanderjagt, and Schueller could not? No. In lengthened detail, never.

There was perhaps a brief glimmer of hope that maybe the experiment would work. As I had observed when Lash was first hired, it was truly and genuinely unprecedented that someone with no professional playing nor coaching experience was given a head coach role. Perhaps Lash could have been the trailblazer for boardroom executives across the country to be relied upon for their fresh perspectives and coaching chops. The Bullets won their first game (1–0 being the only time they had a positive record all season) and then peaked at 5–7. The injuries combined with the rotating cast of both players and coaches then proved to be too much. They had lost six straight when Lash stepped down and the glimmer was completely suppressed. I think the one positive is that it could have been much worse.

Only half-a-year into his three-year contract, Lash now retreats to the boardroom from which he emerged. Chances are that he will still be around the team in some capacity. As the team’s senior basketball advisor from 2023 to 2025, Lash oversaw some major signings. If Schueller’s firing was any suggestion, it was merely the coaching that needed improvement. If Lash’s resignation is any suggestion, the Bullets made a mistake and their experiment has cost them another season.

McDonald now steps up as head coach. It will be his third stint as an interim head coach in the league after leading the Melbourne Tigers in 2010–11 and Melbourne United in 2014–15. Vanderjagt gets looked over after leading the Bullets during their last interim period in 2022–23. The Bullets obviously elected to not undergo another experiment for the time-being and picked one of the two options they had. The team will go back to the exact same phase they went through earlier this year: looking for the head coach to make a difference. Maybe they need to look outside of the boardroom this time.