Port Adelaide came to Perth on Sunday with the unusual situation of having four players marking significant personal milestones - Chad Cornes (200 games), Shaun Burgoyne (150), Brett Ebert (100) and Toby Thurstans (100).
But the Eagles were in no mood to join the celebrations, and outplayed the Power to record a comprehensive 50-point victory.
While Port Adelaide coach Mark Williams speculated after the game about the distractions posed to his players by having a large contingent of family and well-wishers travelling with the side, Lade said the Power headed onto Subiaco Oval determined to do the right thing by the four milestone men.
“We were definitely up before the game,” Lade said.
“This club prides itself on playing well in milestone games. This is probably only the third one ever that we’ve lost.
“And you always remember the ones you lose. One was Gavin Wanganeen’s 300th; we lost that.
“It’s disappointing for Chad, Toby, 'Ebo' and 'Shauny', and it hurts that we’ve put in a performance like that in their special games. You can never get that back now.
“We can only put that one behind us and make sure we use it to spur us on to play well the rest of the season.”
Lade was at a loss to explain what went wrong, but acknowledged that the Power's poor kicking in front of goal had effectively put it out of the game.
“Nothing went right today; everything we tried seemed to break down,” he said.
“The ball would tumble out, and they’d get it and away they’d go. But having said that, we did have a lot of opportunities in front of goal and we just didn’t take them.
“They played pretty quick and had good ball movement, and we just couldn’t seem to slow them down or stop their run. And even when we did, we didn’t make them pay on the scoreboard.
“On the road, you’ve got to take your chances or you’ll get punished. We kicked ourselves out of it in the first half, and we were just chasing jumpers after that.
“If we’d kicked a bit straighter to half time and stayed a bit closer it might have been a different story toward the end, but it wasn’t to be.”
Lade said while the loss was disappointing, there was no cause for panic.
“There were some bright spots,” he said.
“Daniel Motlop up forward (played) against two opponents all day, kicked four goals, and gave a couple off. Some of the work done by the defenders was great given the amount of ball that was coming down.
“It’s only one bad game, and we’ve been travelling alright since the start of the NAB Cup.
“You can’t make wholesale changes after one loss, and we’ll get a few people back next week, including Dean Brogan, so we’re not going to over-react to one poor performance.”
