Sharing is caring: Hawks take advantage of ball movement to blister nets in victory over Bears

QUINCY — Max Booher played it coy when it was suggested he likes shooting in Pepsi Arena.

“A little bit,” Booher said with a wry smile. “Just a little bit.”

Right now, no one shoots it better.

Taking advantage of the Quincy University men’s basketball team’s increasingly better ball movement and several open looks from the perimeter, Booher went 6 of 6 from 3-point range in the first half Saturday night to catapult the Hawks to a 116-73 victory over Barclay College in the Hansen-Spear Holiday Classic.

“Max is a shot maker,” QU coach Brad Hoyt said. “That’s what he does.”

The freshman guard is doing it at a high level. Booher is 8 of 9 from 3-point range in two games played at Pepsi Arena this season — he missed the other two home games with an injury — and is shooting 57.1 percent overall from the perimeter with a team-leading 24 made treys.

Booher, who finished with 20 points on 7-of-10 shooting, also leads the Hawks in scoring at 14.4 points per game.

The reason for his success has as much to do with his teammates as it does his shooting ability. He credited his open looks Saturday to the Hawks’ unselfish nature, their trust in each other and the ability to find the hot hand.

“It’s been 17 weeks in the works,” Booher said of the process of building camaraderie for a team with eight new faces and a new coaching staff when the school year began. “It’s been a long process, but each game, we see it more and more. It’s coming along.”

It was on full display in the first half when the Hawks (5-5) shot 59.5 percent from the field.

“We got into our actions really well,” said Quincy junior guard El Sieger, who scored all of his game-high 23 points in the first half. “We were running our plays really well. Our angles and our cuts we really good at the start.”

It resulted in the Hawks going 12 of 18 from 3-point range in the half with 15 assists on 25 field goals. Overall, Quincy shot 55.8 percent from the field and 50 percent from 3-point range with a season-high 28 assists.

“Share it, the ball moves, people move, the ball finds different people,” said Hoyt, who had five players reach double figures and six players with three or more assists. “There’s no main character in what we’re doing. Everyone needs to be involved.

“We shot it at a really high percentage in the first half because of the ball and the player movement. Those two things are cause and effect.”

What encouraged Hoyt the most was the Hawks’ ability to run the offense without having to set up shooters with specific plays or sets.

“We found Max and El, not out of a set but just through the things that we were doing,” Hoyt said. “That’s a really good step for this group. That’s something we have to get better at. You have to look at how the shots came and where the shots came from. I was really pretty satisfied with that.”

It helps having seen unique challenges through the first 10 games of the season.

“We’ve had a lot of good tests so far, a lot of different types of games,” Sieger said. “The variety has done us good. We know how to work in a lot of different situations now. We trust each other more. We’re building it.”

Nothing should come as a surprise.

“We’ve seen everything,” Booher said.

The Hawks face another challenge as they wrap up the Hansen-Spear Holiday Classic against Saginaw Valley State at 3 p.m. The Cardinals (4-4) had won four of their previous five games prior to Saturday’s 87-73 loss to Maryville.

Barclay, which is coached by former Quincy High School all-stater George Milsap, will face Maryville at 1 p.m.

“It’s not some super feat we’re trying to do,” Sieger said. “It’s stacking up the same stuff we’ve done in practice. We keep trying to rep it in the games at a high level. It’s about who we are and doing it our way and getting it done our way.”

That way is sticking together.

“If we play solid defense, we know we’re going to get good looks at the other end,” Booher said. “Our chemistry together, I like that a lot.”