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WARSAW – So here is how the road looked this time for the Bishop Luers Knights: Paved with glass.
Glass is what they cleaned, thoroughly, in a 78-48 rout of North Judson on Saturday in a Class 2A semistate game. Glass is what they kept the Bluejays away from.
And, yes, off the glass is where Lawrence Barnett threw the basketball, with 5:37 to play in the third quarter, as he scurried upcourt with the Bluejays and his teammates in hot pursuit.
Up went the ball onto the backboard, scooped underhand by Barnett. It sailed to Deshaun Thomas as the trailer on the play. Flush went the two-hand dunk on the alley-oop, one of many for Thomas and Evan Blackmon and particularly Sean Day, who seemed to fill the highlight reel by himself.
Call it a signature writ large as the bigger, faster Knights simply ran the overmatched Bluejays out of the Warsaw High School gym to punch their ticket to Conseco Fieldhouse and a second straight state finals. Luers (22-4) will take on Brownstown (20-6) in the state championship game Saturday.
“It’s a good feeling,” said Day, who finished with 14 points, eight rebounds and four of Luers’ eight blocked shots. “You work so hard and put in so many hours, it feels good to finally get the reward.”
The reward this time was a stress-free afternoon that was never in doubt after the 1:47 mark of the first quarter, when freshman John Eckert scored to give North Judson a 15-11 lead. The Bluejays promptly went silent for the next 7:07, during which Luers went on a 19-0 run to open a 30-15 gulf that never slipped under double digits again.
The Knights did it with swarming, disruptive defense, total command of the glass and total domination by Thomas, who finished with 27 points and 15 rebounds. Barnett (17), Day and Blackmon (11) also hit double figures, and Luers outrebounded North Judson 48-31, including 19 offensive rebounds.
“Our thing was to look for opportunities for second-chance shots, and we wanted to contest a lot of shots,” Luers coach James Blackmon said.
Contested them, blocked them and altered the ones they didn’t – especially across the middle two quarters, when Luers outscored North Judson 41-18 and harassed the Bluejays into 6-of-31 shooting.
“Coach kept on telling us we had to come out fast a lot more and everything,” Day said. “We’d been starting out slow. We had to pick up our game like we should have been doing the whole year.”
“We just kept on playing hard, getting out on the breaks, playing good defense,” Thomas said.
And when it was over, the Knights were right back where they were a year ago: Cutting down the nets in Warsaw and looking ahead to Indianapolis.
“We’re gonna enjoy tonight,” Blackmon said. “I’m not gonna look beyond what we accomplished tonight, because this was special.”
