Despite an 18-12 loss at home to the Bulldogs on Monday night, Storm coach Craig Bellamy believes the Round 6 fixture was close to his side's best performance of the season so far.
"It's hard to say it was our best performance of the season when we lost and we've won four others, but I think that's pretty close," Bellamy said.
"I thought our performance was pretty good, obviously though it's a bit frustrating to play like that and lose. We won most things stat-wise, except on the scoreboard.
"It was certainly our most consistent performance, especially defensively and most of the time with the ball. We weren't great with the ball all the time, but I thought we took a couple of steps forward there.
"I ouldn’t fault our effort tonight, I couldn’t fault our defence at all, we had a plan with our defence and I thought it worked really well. Usually when we play like that we've won, but that wasn’t the case tonight. It's disappointing and frustrating, but at the end of the day we'll take a few things out of it and move on to better things."
Storm captain Cameron Smith was also buoyed by his side's showing on Monday night, and the Melbourne hooker heaped praise on the Storm's big men.
"I thought our forward pack outplayed their forward pack for the most part of the match, and we needed to because that's why we've been dominated over the last few years, but they were exceptional tonight," Smith said.
"We took it to the experienced guys at the start in [James] Graham and [Aiden] Tolman, and when [David] Klemmer and [Sam] Kasiano, came on, I didn’t think they troubled us too much.
"They’re four very good players, and to have guys like Klemmer and Kasiano coming off the bench is a pretty formidable forward pack and team you've got to play against, so I thought our middle did a very good job tonight."
With the Storm's below par attack being a topic of discussion over the early course of the season, Smith was pleased with the direction it's now heading, but still said there's plenty to work with.
"We simplified a few things this week, and I think it was noticeable tonight. It solved a bit of confusion down the other end, and I said last week we'd be playing a lot more ad-lib football, and I think that's noticeable as well with the amount of offloads we had," Smith said.
"I thought our attack was largely improved on last week, but obviously there's still some work we need to do there to come up with some points."
