The Klein Forest Golden Eagles go into the boys basketball playoffs unbeaten.
Golden Eagles are focusing on a championship
Cary Black doesn’t run a traditional offense at Klein Forest.
Basketball nerds know it as a four-out motion offense. College basketball fans know it as the system that helped Villanova win the national championship at NRG Stadium last year. The casual basketball fan would recognize it as an offense with four guards, where everyone on the floor can handle and pass the ball instead of letting one traditional point guard run everything.
Black doesn’t want too much credit for installing the system at Klein Forest in 2008, because he can admit he just sort of fell into it.
“That year, I looked at our roster, and our five best players who needed to be on the court were all guards,” Black said. “I said, ‘What are we going to do with five point guards?’ ”
As it turns out, the answer was: Put them on the court at the same time and make it all the way to the state tournament.
Nine years later, Black runs the same system, and he might have another group of guards that could take him to state.
‘A new season now’
The Golden Eagles are 30-0 and ranked No. 1 in the state. It wasn’t a fluky perfect regular season, either, it was a tour of domination. Only two of those 30 wins ended up being closer than nine points, and Klein Forest has outscored opponents by an average of 80-51.
To the players’ credit, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of chest-thumping about an impressive winloss record that won’t mean anything when they open the playoffs against Nimitz on Tuesday.
“We never really worried
about staying undefeated, it just kind of turned out that way,” said Cedrick Alley, 6-6, who averages 17 points and seven rebounds per game. “It’s a new season now, so it doesn’t really matter that we went 30-0.”
Still, an undefeated season
is rare. At the highest classification, no boys basketball team has had a perfect regular season and won the state championship since Duncanville in 2007. Since then, three teams — Atascocita last year, Lakeview Centennial in 2011 and Strake Jesuit in 2009 — made it to the state tournament with an unblemished record only to be sent home.
“These kids don’t expect to lose, I’ll give them that,” Black said. “As coaches, we definitely don’t think about being undefeated, and I don’t really hear the players talking about it either. They’re a confident group, though. They think they’re going to win every time out.”
Only once this season did it look like Klein Forest’s confidence was unwarranted. At Westfield on Dec. 6, the Eagles trailed by eight points with about three minutes left. Klein Forest rallied down the stretch, and in the final seconds, Reggie Miller drove the lane and hit the gamewinning bucket at the buzzer for a 66-64 win.
Of the 30 wins, that’s the only one the Eagles seem to want to talk about, because they know cynics point to their district, which was devoid of anyone who could challenge them, as a reason for their impressive record. The players also have peeked at the playoff bracket and know a possible rematch with 15thranked Westfield looms in the third round.
“We want that matchup,” said Miller, who averages 12 points and five assists per game. “Everyone thinks it was a fluke that we came back to win that game. Westfield is really good. We know that, so we want that matchup again.”
Brotherly bonds
Black probably isn’t as eager as his players to take another shot at a good team, but he thinks his players’ attitude compares favorably to that of the only Klein Forest teams to make it to state — the 2008 group and the 2000 team on which Black was an assistant under coach Larry Pitre.
“Coach Pitre always said that you have to be really good to make it to state, but that isn’t good enough, you also have to be lucky and catch some breaks,” Black said. “I know we’re good, but we’ll have to catch some breaks to make it that far. One thing this team has that is similar to those teams is that they are brothers. They might fight like brothers sometimes, but they’re so close, and they hold each other accountable. I think that’s a good sign for us.”