Storm look to shore up second-half fade against Penrith

At the same stage last year, Penrith had leaked 118 points to sit 13th on the ladder.

Asked what set the Panthers apart from rivals, Bellamy said he could "be here all day" but their defence was the obvious statistic.

"When you have a look at how many points they've had scored against them, that's a pretty good stat," he said.

"The Panthers are head and shoulders above everybody else at the moment, so we know we've got our work cut out tomorrow night.

"We've had a reasonable preparation  ... the stuff we've done on the field's been pretty good, so hopefully we can find improvement in our game tomorrow night because we will need it."

The Storm head to CommBank Stadium in unfamiliar territory after losing two straight matches for the first time since the start of the 2025 season, while they last lost three in a row midway through 2022.

In both matches, against Brisbane and North Queensland, they've given up sizeable leads with the veteran coach questioning his team's fitness under fatigue and mental fortitude.

"They're both carbon copies of each other, we've had good leads and and blew them so we've needed to have a look at that - is it our fitness, is it our mentality?

"It's really disappointing but if you get it back to reality and looking on the positive side, we got beat by four points in both games and one of those games was against the premiers.

"We've pointed out and worked out where we think we need to improve."

While the Storm were rocked early in the week with Fijian forward Tui Kamikamica suffering a stroke, they got some welcome news with youngster Cooper Clarke signing a three-year deal.

Making his debut this year, the 19-year-old has carried a big workload.

"Cooper's done a really good job this year and he's only a young kid, and I think it's been a bit underrated how good a job he's done because he's been playing out of position on the edge and all of his career he's played in the ruck."