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Adjustments key for Jacks in second half
The Quincy High School boys basketball team opened the second half of the Central Washington Athletic Conference season last Saturday with a 40-38 win over Selah.
The win in and of itself was huge for the Jacks — it vaulted them to 6-4 and a tie for fourth place with Othello, just one game behind the conference's trio of leaders — Wapato, Toppenish and Grandview.
But what was perhaps more impressive from Quincy's perspective was the way it pulled out yet another tight CWAC conference contest. The Jacks team that beat the Vikings last Saturday wasn't exactly the Jacks team that beat the Vikings in their first game of the season on Dec. 11.
In order to emerge from the tightly-packed group of teams in the upper and middle half of the conference in the second half of the season, a team is going to need to make adjustments. The adjustments that the Jacks made against Selah were successful, for the most part, and can be applied to other teams during the second go-round.
"We spend time during the week watching tape of the previous game and try to show the kids what kind of things they tried to do against us — what offense they did against our defense and what ways they tried to exploit us a little bit," said Quincy head coach Wade Petersen. "Hopefully that will give the kids a little advantage when we get in the game a second time; they've seen it before, and now they know what the teams are trying to do and what their attack plans are.
"It's real beneficial, from my perspective, to have played a team before. We know what they're trying to do now. It's not going to be a big surprise like it was the first time."
In last Saturday's win over the Vikings, Petersen started to tinker with some things.
On the offensive end, he moved his leading scorer, Eric Martin, from his customary post position to a wing spot. The move was designed to give Martin more touches on the offensive end and create mismatches; Petersen believes that teams will adjust to Martin in the second half by throwing more double-teams at him, but the Quincy coach figures that if Martin plays on the perimeter, that will force opponents to use a smaller player to guard Martin.
"We've already seen teams now are trying to double-team Eric and take away his ability to score. We made some adjustments with that," Petersen said. "We're trying to make some counter-moves to what we think teams are going to do against him.
"We'll see how teams play us. If they play us with a really big guy and try to take away (Martin's) inside game, we'll move him out. And part of it has to do when we rotate guys through. When Ian (Dearie) comes in, that will let up Eric free on the perimeter. We have some flexibility with our lineup to do that."
The move worked, for the most part; Martin scored a team-high 19 points, was more involved in the team's offense and even drained three 3-pointers in the first half.
Defensively, the Jacks focused on shutting down Selah guard Nick Longmire, who torched Quincy in their first meeting in December for 30 points.
The second time around, the Jacks held Longmire to eight points by employing a more aggressive version of their standard 2-3 zone defense.
"We try to identify who we think hurt our defense and where they fit into their offense, (and) we try to take that away and make somebody else beat us," Petersen said. "We just tried to make sure (Longmire) didn't get open shots. He scored eight points, and most of those were (because of) mistakes by us — we didn't make a right rotation or something. If we can solidify that, we can be even better."
Looking forward, the Jacks will need to use a similar mentality against some of the conference's other top shooters.
Most of the teams in the CWAC have at least one outstanding outside gunner — Wapato's Willie Blodgett, the conference's leading scorer; Grandview's Rogi Fajardo; Ephrata Ross Bucher; and Longmire, to name a few.
The key to slowing those shooters down, according to Quincy point guard Jay Cedergreen, is talking.
"We've been working on really communicating as a team, letting (each other) know where the shooter's at, and playing him to get out of his comfort zone, (make him) play a game he doesn't want to play," he said. "We've been working on that in practice. I think we did a really good job of adjusting to Longmire when we played Selah the second time. Communication was the big thing — letting people know where (Longmire) was at."
Of course, the Jacks' opponents are going to made adjustments to Quincy as well.
"Well, I'm pretty sure we won't be getting many back doors," Cedergreen said. "Coaches jump up and down when they see that coming, so that could be an adjustment. They're definitely going to be packing it in (down low on defense). I don't think (teams) expected Jesse (Gonzales) to be as much of a threat as he's been, boarding-wise, so they're going to be looking to keep us off the glass because Jesse and Martin have done a real good job. They'll make adjustments just like any good coaches would."
Teams need to make in-game adjustments as well, and that's something that the Jacks are pretty good at.
In the CWAC, there's a few teams, such as Wapato, Grandview, Ephrata and East Valley, that like to run up and down the court, push the tempo, and live and die with their transition games and outside shooting. There's also a couple of teams, such as Ellensburg, that like to slow things down, play more of a half-court game and use their height to their advantage.
So what kind of team is Quincy? Halfway through the season, there's not a definitive answer to that question, and that suits the Jacks just fine.
"I think what's special about us — not special; that's too mushy of a word. What's unique about this team is that we can play fast. We can play slow. If a team really likes to get up a fast break, we can pull it out and slow it down, kind of take them out of their game. We can use that to our advantage also," Cedergreen said.
"I know the guys would like to get up and go, because that's always fun to play. But sometimes you gotta slow it down and take another team out of how they like to play. They want to play first-to-100-(wins), and you've gotta sit down, play defense and make them work on offense. It can vary from night to night with our team. You saw against Wapato or Ephrata that we can put up big numbers, or we can slow it down and pound it in against Ellensburg."
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