Mercurial Knoch boys basketball team works for consistency

By: HSSN Staff
Monday, December 24, 2018 | 5:06 PM

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In something of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde homage, Knoch experienced good Knights and bad Knights in the early portion of its schedule.

The good Knights involved shots dropping from the perimeter and a faster pace as Knoch got out in transition. The bad Knights saw the opposite: a bogged-down pace and a lid on the rim.

But as Knoch keeps experimenting with nearly the entire Section 1-4A schedule ahead, the Knights (4-3, 1-0) believe they’re nearing the right formula for consistent success.

“The key that I go by is patience,” senior Julian Sanks said. “If we’re down by the first quarter, we can’t get down on ourselves. We’ve still got three quarters to play. If we get down by the first quarter, we’ve just got to know that we’re still in this game and no matter what we do, we’ve just got to play well.

“We have more comebacks this year than last year. I think if we just play how we know how to play and be well-rounded, I think we can get a lot of big wins in the section.”

When Knoch is hitting its shots, the Knights can be difficult to beat. Take an 83-47 win over Indiana in mid-December, when they drained seven 3-pointers in the first quarter to turn the game into an early rout, or a 67-49 victory over Valley in which they overcame a slow start to overwhelm the Vikings in the second and third quarters.

When they’re not falling, however, outcomes like a 56-34 loss to Steel Valley become possible.

“We’ve just got to be ready to go in all our games,” junior Scott Fraser said. “Sometimes we might not be mentally ready. If we’re shooting well and we’re playing well, then everything seems like it’s going well for us. We just need to make sure that we’re able to do that consistently.”

One key, Fraser said, is finding ways to score other than shooting 3s — driving to the basket for layups, or drawing fouls and converting from the free-throw line.

The other is a longtime calling card for the Knights under coach Ron McNabb: gritty, shutdown defense.

That, at least, posed much less of an issue for Knoch in the first several games of the season: The Knights are allowing 47.6 points per game and are coming off their best defensive performance of the season in a 49-30 victory over Mt. Pleasant in their section opener Friday.

“Defense is a mentality, and rebounding is a mentality, so you can always do those two,” Fraser said.

“We know that our defense should always be there from (McNabb). He’s taught us that every year, and he’s been right. It doesn’t matter how you shoot, defense is a completely different game.”

Getting stops on defense also allows the Knights to get out and run in transition, a new look for a program that for years succeeded with a slower pace.

“We basically start five guards, so (running) is something we have to do,” Sanks said. “We don’t have that big unit in the post anymore, so some of us have to rebound. But it has helped us a lot running up and down the court. We get a lot more open shots.”

Knoch likely won’t become a completely run-and-gun team, but the Knights believe they have more than enough firepower to compete for a Section 1-4A championship after missing the playoffs each of the last two seasons in Class 5A.

Last season Knoch sank to 7-14 as it broke in an almost entirely new rotation while playing in the ultra-difficult Section 2-5A with the likes of PIAA runner-up Mars. But an offseason drop to Class 4A, the return of starting guards Fraser, Sanks, Jared Schrecengost and Jake Scheidt and the emergence of freshman guard Ryan Lang have the Knights confident they can have more good Knights than bad down the stretch.

“It’s not like a free walk to sections,” Sanks said. “We’ve still got to go in, do what we’ve got to do and get a win. All these teams are hungry, and we’re hungry as well.”

Doug Gulasy is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Doug at dgulasy@tribweb.com or via Twitter @dgulasy_Trib.

Tags: Knoch