The Tigers put last week's 103-point drubbing behind them to hold a 23-point lead against the Bombers midway through the third quarter.
But things began to unravel when Bachar Houli and Chris Newman gave the ball away in uncharacteristic fashion, leaving the door open for the Bombers.
"They're the killers. I think we could have been maybe 20 points up at three-quarter time … but two mistakes from two of our better players - they're the mistakes we need to iron out of our game to get where we need to go," Hardwick said after his team slumped to 39-point defeat.
"In the first two and a half quarters I thought we were the better side. I think there was a period there in the first 10 minutes of the third quarter when we dominated, but we just couldn't quite take our chances.
"AFL these days is a game of chances - we didn't take ours and they took theirs."
Hardwick was more measured in his response to the loss than he was a week earlier when he apologised to fans for his team's performance and maintained his team was a better than what the evidence of Saturday's second half suggested.
"The thing that killed us was our lack of composure," he said of the 10-goal surge.
"We had control of the ball and we just made a silly mistake that cost us going the other way. We've just got to rectify that and get that out of our game.
"At the moment the mistakes that are hurting us are the simple ones that we make that we control which, going back the other way, is killing us on the scoreboard."
Out-of-sorts forward Jack Riewoldt again failed to have an influence, but the coach maintains he is not carrying am injury and expects a better effort from him against Gold Coast next weekend.
Hardwick is adamant his team's development is still headed in the right direction despite the run of outs that followed on the heels of four wins and a draw in an encouraging first nine matches of the season.
"It's a funny one because people [forget] that we are a very, very young side," he said.
"We've just got to keep playing these players to get us where we need to go. The easy thing is to top up with [experienced] talent, but we've just got to make sure that these players play as much footy together as humanly possible.
"At some stage it would be good to get Dylan Grimes, David Astbury and Kelvin Moore back, but they're not coming back this year so we've just got to keep playing these guys, develop them, and then get set up for when we do have a genuine crack at a finals assault."
