Blue Devils battle back from first-half effort deemed ‘worst of all time’ to fend off Panthers

QUINCY — It is not an exaggeration to say the Quincy High School boys basketball team played its worst 16 minutes of the season Friday night.

It’s not hyperbole either to suggest it was the worst half of the Blue Devils’ careers.

They freely admitted it was a struggle beyond measure.

“Worst of all time,” senior guard Dom Clay said. “Seriously, of all time.”

Somehow, it didn’t derail the Blue Devils’ pursuit of an undefeated run through the Western Big 6 Conference. Credit that to experience and maturity.

Held to one field goal in the first quarter and to just 13 points in the first half by United Township’s defense and its own unwillingness to stick to the game plan, state-ranked Quincy responded by ripping off a 22-3 third-quarter run and finishing a 53-43 victory at Blue Devil Gym.

“We had a lot of things we had to pull together,” Quincy senior forward Rico Clay Jr. said. “It all came through and all came together in the second half.”

It means the Blue Devils (23-2, 11-0 WB6) are a game closer to another conference crown. Quincy, which is ranked third in the Class 4A state poll, holds a two-game lead over Moline and Rock Island with three games to play in the conference race. Moline comes to Blue Devil Gym on Feb. 14 and Quincy heads to the Rocky Fieldhouse on Feb. 18.

There is also a trip for the Blue Devils to Rock Island Alleman next Tuesday.

“We can’t have another effort like this,” Quincy coach Andy Douglas said.

The Blue Devils certainly can’t repeat the first half.

They trailed 11-1 before Dom Clay’s baseline drive for a layin with 2:12 to go in the first quarter resulted in the first field goal. A four-and-a-half minute drought between field goals followed in the second quarter and Quincy finished the half going 4 of 21 from the field and 2 of 13 from 3-point range.

It explains how the Blue Devils trailed by as many as 17 points in the half.

“We knew the game plan and we didn’t do any of that,” Rico Clay Jr. said. “We kept the ball in our hands. We were holding the ball up top, in the paint, at the block area. We weren’t moving the ball or sharing it. We weren’t doing our best.”

Stagnant is the best way to describe it.

“The ball was sticking a lot,” said Dom Clay, who led the Blue Devils with 18 points. “We weren’t moving it. Nobody was crashing the glass. We were just shooting threes and putting our hands up like this (motioning for a made 3-pointer). And that wasn’t working.”

However, one of those 3-pointers seemed to change things. After Keshaun Thomas missed a pair of free throws, the Blue Devils’ Bradley Longcor III grabbed the offensive rebound and found Mark Louthan alone at the top of the key as he knocked down the trey with 58 seconds remaining in the half to trim the deficit to 22-13.

“I just shoot my shot every game the same no matter what,” said Louthan, who made seven 3-pointers in two games against United Township this season.

A couple of big 3-pointers were to follow.

First, the Blue Devils had to regroup at halftime, a process that began with the players identifying their mistakes before the coaches even spoke. Douglas said he raised his voice to get their attention, but it wasn’t a fire-and-brimstone kind of speech.

“I didn’t have to rattle the rafters too much,” Douglas said. “(Assistant coach Jeff Obert) was down there and he got into them a little bit. They needed to hear that from somebody else. We needed a wake-up call.

“If that first half wasn’t enough of a wake-up call, then nothing coming out of my mouth was going to be any more of one.”

Dom Clay opened the second half with a baseline jumper on Quincy’s first possession, kickstarting a run the Panthers couldn’t curtail. Louthan and Longcor each hit 3-pointers, and Clay hit a 3-pointer with four minutes remaining in the third quarter to give the Blue Devils their first lead at 26-25.

It was part of a 17-0 run that put Quincy ahead 35-25 heading to the fourth quarter.

In fact, over the final three minutes of the second quarter and all eight minutes of the third quarter, the Blue Devils outscored the Panthers 30-3.

“At halftime, while the coaches are talking among themselves, someone always steps up and tells us what we need to get done,” Louthan said. “We all know. We all know what it takes. You could tell we listened to each other and worked together to change things in the second half.”

It took a mature approach to flip that switch.

“It’s understanding what we need to do and executing that,” Louthan said. “We did what we needed to do.”