‘We played as one’: Blue Devils feed off each other to win fifth consecutive Thanksgiving title

QUINCY — Quincy High School boys basketball coach Andy Douglas burned a timeout only 2 minutes, 45 seconds into Saturday night’s championship game of the 53rd QHS Thanksgiving Tournament for two reasons.

Stem the tide and send a message.

Burbank St. Laurence scored the game’s first seven points and was emotionally gaining steam before the timeout curtailed everything. The Vikings went more than 2 ½ minutes without scoring and never found a similar up-tempo rhythm, although the Blue Devils didn’t take the lead for good until a Bradley Longcor III 3-pointer 45 seconds into the second quarter.

That finally happened because the Blue Devils punched back.

Douglas needed to remind his team that’s always going to be the case.

“When you’re playing teams that want to come to Blue Devil Gym and experience everything — we say this often to our guys — they’re going to be up for this game and be energetic,” Douglas said. “Highly competitive teams want that. They want nothing more than to knock us off on our homecourt.

“So they came out and landed a couple blows and got us on our heels just a bit. But our guys did a really good job of weathering the storm. They didn’t get flustered. They trusted each other. They trusted what we wanted. And they found a way to pull through.”

Mark Louthan’s 3-pointer from the right corner with 4:50 remaining in the quarter got it started.

The deficit was gone within two minutes and the Blue Devils never let up, pulling away for a 69-47 victory and their fifth consecutive Thanksgiving Tournament championship. The Blue Devils now have won 18 games at home in a row and are 42-3 at Blue Devil Gym in the last three-plus seasons combined.

More importantly, these three latest victories were the true result of teamwork.

“We played as one,” Quincy senior forward Keshaun Thomas said. “We had three guys in double figures, almost four. It’s our goal to get four or five guys in double figures every game. We’re knocking on that. So it’s a great team win. We played great. We talked great. And we did it together.”

All it took was one big shot to get it going.

The Blue Devils failed to score on their first five possessions, missing four 3-point attempts and turning the ball over once. It wasn’t until Louthan caught a Longcor kickout in the right corner and buried the 3-pointer that the sizable crowd gathered for Hall of Fame induction night got loud.

“You have to take the lid off the bucket,” Louthan said.

That’s when everything started to flow.

“We always got open shots,” said Louthan, a senior forward. “We didn’t force anything. We shared the ball great. No one was greedy with the ball. Defensively, we were constantly talking and moving. We were keeping it organized.”

That translated into the ability to score in transition and control the tempo.

The Blue Devils outscored the Vikings 22-12 in the second quarter with Longcor taking control. The senior guard made three 3-pointers and scored 11 of his game-high 32 points in the second quarter. It gave him 71 points in the tournament and earned him the Paul Dennis MVP award.

“Brad was unbelievable tonight,” Douglas said. “But it takes teammates to get him the ball. It takes guys doing the right things to get him open. He was great individually, but he was better because we were good as a group.”

Longcor also had a hand in slowing Vikings senior guard E.J. Mosley. The Purdue-Fort Wayne recruit scored eight points in the first half, but was scoreless in the third quarter and managed just two points in the fourth quarter. 

Mosley was guarded by every Quincy player on the floor at some point, even Thomas.

“Everybody played a role in this win,” Douglas said.

Thomas finished with 13 points, reaching 1,000 career points in the process, and Dom Clay added 12 points. Sophomore guard Zerrick Johnson led St. Laurence with 13 points.

“Now we get a full week to watch the film and get better in practice,” Longcor said. “But we feel good about how things went, what we did well and what we need to work on. We’ll get better, but this is a good starting point.”