Power in the post: Thomas dominates inside as Blue Devils win WB6 championship outright

QUINCY — Each time Keshaun Thomas gained position on a Moline defender in the post Friday night, Quincy High School boys basketball coach Andy Douglas could hear former assistant coach Tom Lepper barking at the guards to make the entry pass.

In fact, Douglas could envision the lumbering 6-foot-9 Lepper getting off the bench and stomping as he bellowed.

“I can see him yelling right now,” Douglas said. “He’d be yelling, ‘Get him the dang ball, get him the dang ball.’”

Whether the Blue Devils actually heard those heavenly words or not, they listened.

And Thomas took complete advantage of that.

The 6-foot-6 power forward scored 20 first-half points and finished with a career-high 32 points overall, playing more physical than anyone else on the Blue Devil Gym floor and leading state-ranked Quincy to a 69-52 Western Big 6 Conference victory.

The victory secured an outright WB6 championship for Quincy — it is the Blue Devils’ 26th title overall and their 15th crown outright — and they can finish an undefeated run through the league by winning Tuesday night at Rock Island. 

So the work isn’t done and the celebration must wait.

“Rocky is a big game,” Thomas said. “We have to go there and show our dominance. We can’t play slow. We’ve already won the conference, but that doesn’t mean anything if we don’t go out there and finish this thing undefeated.”

It explains why the Blue Devils, ranked No. 2 in the Class 4A state poll, played with so much purpose Friday night.

After the always emotional Senior Night festivities, the Blue Devils (26-2, 13-0 WB6) needed a quarter to settle in. Leading 15-14 at the start of the second quarter, Quincy went on a 7-0 run. It closed the second quarter on an 8-0, using a Thomas basket off a Longcor assist to head to the locker room with a 37-23 lead.

“We had to check the emotions and get to work,” Thomas said.

It spilled over to the third quarter with Thomas scoring the first basket of the second half and eight points in the first five minutes of the second half. By then, the Blue Devils had pushed the advantage to as many as 18 points.

The Maroons (24-6, 10-3 WB6) made a run to get within 10 points early in the fourth quarter as Trey Taylor and Brady Welch both finished with 13 points, but the Blue Devils answered defensively each time. Or they threw the ball to Thomas in the post.

“I’m sure he wanted to … I’m not sure redeem himself is the right phrase … but he didn’t have his best game the first time we played,” Moline coach Sean Taylor said of Quincy’s 71-56 victory at Wharton Field House in mid-January in which Thomas scored just eight points. “He certainly had one tonight. Great player. 

“We doubled him when we played at Wharton and he kicked out for threes. So this time, we were going to live with him scoring, and he kept scoring it.”

Moline couldn’t stop it, especially not when the Blue Devils were sharing it at a high level.

“They knew (Moline) couldn’t guard me,” Thomas said. “So they just kept feeding it to me. They fed me as much as they could.”

It was much easier to do one-on-one.

“Once I saw it was isolation and I was by myself with a defender, I was taking advantage of that,” said Thomas, who was joined in double digits by Longcor with 21 points. “That’s everybody’s first thought. If they’re not going to double me, I’m going to go to work.”

It’s something Douglas and the coaching staff have been pleading for Thomas to do.

“Coach told me I had to be more physical down low,” Thomas said. “Once I established my game down there and my physicality, it was just on for me.”

It needs to stay on if the Blue Devils want to win playoff-caliber games.

“This group played like they wanted to put it away,” Douglas said.