OK, so there are a couple of glaring differences whenever this year's Douglas boys' basketball team takes the floor.
The coach is new. Nearly half last year's roster is gone and there is that one 6-foot, 10-inch, 255-pound hole in the middle.
But there are hardly any shoes waiting to be filled.
Losing a senior class that had made up the majority of the starting lineup in the previous three seasons is usually the perfect recipe for a rebuilding season.
But through four games at Douglas, it appears the cupboard is anything but bare.
What we are beginning to see is former coach Keith Lewis' vision of a strong year-round basketball program come to fruition.
Last year's senior class was really the first fruits of those efforts. This year may be the season that establishes the Tigers as a perennial power.
Here are my quick observations through four games:
- While 6-10 phenom Keith Olson is away at Northern Arizona, 6-7 senior Jeff Nady has shown tremendous improvment from last year. Nady showed flashes in his two previous varsity seasons, but early on here he's shown he can really take a game over on the offensive end.
- When they want to, this team can flat out play defense.
Maybe it's the fact that five of their top six guys saw time on the defensive side of the ball during football season, or that first-year coach Corey Thacker has tweaked the system just so, but through four games, Douglas had has extended runs in each where as a team it was able to shut out its opponent for multiple minutes (see the seven-minute stretch in the fourth quarter against high-octane Reed or the 46-7 run against Dayton).
Last year's coach Rob Streeter said late last season that with the group he had coming back, he planned on running a lot of presses and traps. It appears that's exactly the way Thacker went when he came on board.
- If junior James McLaughlin can get loose along the baseline, he is downright lethal. If nothing else, he may be the most acrobatic player in the Northern 4A this year.
- Ross Bertolone and Tim Rudnick have evenly split the starts at point so far. Rudnick brings more of a steady, methodic style to the court while Bertolone can really push the ball with his speed and vision of the floor. Expect to see both guys get a lot of time as the season goes on -- it will give Douglas a nice change-of-pace option either way.
- I wouldn't have thought Nady would be the team's leader in 3-pointers, but for now he is. The Tigers haven't really opened up from outside yet, so it's tough to tell if they'll have the same go-to option as they did with Mike Gransbery last year. But Kevin Emm, McLaughlin and sophomore CJ Marcotte have all shown the potential to step in to that role.
- Four games, two last-second finishes. Sure, Douglas came up on the wrong end of both of those, but you can't buy that kind of pressure experience this early in the year. Those lessons will pay off later in the season.
- 3A, 3A, 3A. Thacker probably thought the majority of his 3A coaching days were over when he left Spring Creek, but due to early-season scheduling conflicts and tournament pull-outs, he'll have matched up against four 3A schools in five games after Wednesday's game against Lowry. With that in mind, everything above is subject to how the Tigers perform once their regularly going up against 4A schools.
After Tuesday night's loss to Galena, the Lady Tigers are off to a 6-2 start.
It marks their best start in several years and with its strong veteran core and early-season wins over Spanish Springs and Hug, this year's Tigers are showing all the signs of making a run once playoff time rolls around.
This team, as has been the case the last two seasons, can play solid defense. But this year they have a strong cast of scorers to help build off that on the offensive end.
At Tuesday's rivalry basketball game between Valley middle schools Pau-Wa-Lu and Carson Valley, no fewer than 15 basketball players from Douglas were in attendance.
Somewhere along the way, this turned into one continuous program from the top on down.
