Pace of play, quality backcourts of tourney teams will test Blue Devils’ maturity and growth

QUINCY — Andy Douglas is looking for a test.

Pass or fail, it’s what the Quincy High School boys basketball team needs.

The Blue Devils return five starters, the first two players off the bench and a wealth of talent and experience. It was a fruitful offseason as they embraced the need to be more unselfish and adjusted to playing more man-to-man defense instead of the traditional 1-2-2 zone scheme.

Douglas isn’t sure how that translates to success. The 52nd QHS Thanksgiving Tournament will show him.

The Blue Devils open their season at 7 p.m. Thursday against Chicago Phillips, a team coming off a 21-9 campaign that opened this season Tuesday with a 70-67 victory over Proviso East. Tinley Park and Springfield Lanphier make up the remainder of the tourney field. 

“You always hope you’re going up against teams that are going to challenge you or are going to push you,” said Douglas, entering his 10th season with a 166-78 record after going 25-7 last season. “Starting this early in the season, you want to make sure you’re facing some adversity. I think with the teams coming in we’re going to see a little bit of all of that.”

The three tournament foes won a combined 53 games last winter while averaging 60.4 points per game, led by Phillips and its 69.5-points-per-game average. Quincy averaged 62 points per game last season

The propensity of all four teams to want to score in transition and push the pace offensively has Douglas believing its going to be a run-and-gun kind of tournament.

“These are groups that are going to be able to get up and down the floor,” Douglas said. “We think we have a quick and a team that’s going to be able to run the floor as well as anybody. I know these three teams coming in want to do the same thing. They want to play at a fast pace. They want to pressure you defensively. They want to get after it.

“We hope to see everything this weekend to get our guys prepared for what conference play is going to look like and what our non-conference schedule is going to look like.”

Phillips graduated all-state guard Jaheim Savage and swingman Mykel Lindsay, who both are playing at Bryant & Stratton College, but the Wildcats have junior guards Amari Edwards and 

EJ Cooper to build around. Edwards and Cooper combined for 41 points against Proviso East.

Tinley Park returns co-captain Nolan Maciejewski, a 5-foot-10 junior guard who is receiving heavy recruiting interest in baseball. He joins a large senior class that is deep in backcourt talent but lacks size. Bernard McHerron, a 6-foot-2 senior, is one of the taller players on the roster.

Lanphier opened the season with a 78-44 loss to Chicago Whitney Young, which is expected to be one of the top 10 teams in the state. Lanphier is expected to challenge in the Capital City with two of the top players in the junior class in 5-foot-10 guard JaiQuan Holman and 6-foot-3 swingman Shaunassey Hatchett Jr.

Quincy features seniors Ralph Wires and Camden Brown along with a loaded junior class that includes Bradley Longcor III, Keshaun Thomas and Dominique Clay. Longcor, the top returning scorer, suffered a knee injury during the offseason and won’t play this weekend.

He is practicing with the Blue Devils, but the 6-foot-3 point guard likely won’t see the floor for two weeks.

“He’s closer than we thought he’d be at this point,” Douglas said. “We all thought it would take a little more time, but he looks good.”

With or without Longcor, Douglas still expects the offense to have rhythm.

“Being unselfish is the key to that,” the coach said.

And he wants to see growth defensively.

“Defensively, we’ve gone through the motions in practice quite a bit,” Douglas said. “We’ve had teams that are a lot less talented than this team, but they’ve been able to compete because of the heart they had defensively and how they played as a team and as a unit defensively.

“We like to score, we like to run, we like to make plays offensively. But are we going to share that same sort of desire on the defensive end to get stops and turn it into offense for us? Defense is going to be huge for us and how we guard, whether that’s in man-to-man, which we’re going to play a lot, or zone, which we will play some of as well.”