A bounce back season is underway for the Paul Kane Blues in high school men’s basketball.
The metro Edmonton division two team is on the upswing after missing the playoffs with only three wins.
“We’re going to be very competitive. We should be up there in the top of div two,” said head coach Evan Eger. “We’re going to be deep. We’re going to be talented. It should be fun.”
Five returnees will do the heavy lifting to put Paul Kane back where it belongs.
“We’ve got a more experienced team than we had last year and we’ve got a lot of talent one to 13,” said forward Jack MacPherson, a 2018 Metro Athletics all-star. “We’re going to have a good year. We’re feeling strong coming off the play-in round. We have high expectations for ourselves.”
Paul Kane started off last season with five losses in a row while dropping eight overall and two of the setbacks were 61-44 to the St. Albert Skyhawks and 85-76 to the Bellerose Bulldogs in February.
“Those were two tough games but we learned from them and we’re going to grow from them,” MacPherson said. “We hope to do everything we can to get back at them.”
Growing pains hurt the Paul Kane’s ability to win.
“We were really young and we just had trouble closing games. We were in a lot of close ones but at the end we just made a couple of mistakes in the last couple of minutes that really cost us,” MacPherson said. “This year, we’ve got to be better at finishing games than we were last year.”
Eger agreed. “We found ways to lose games just because of youth. Now, with our youth from last year, they’ve all been there and they’ve all gone through those scenarios in those games so we’re going to be that much better for it.”
As for the team’s strength, “As a coach I would love to say defence but it’s not quite there yet,” Eger said. “Offensively we can definitely put some points up on the board. We have some firepower on this team.”
Paul Kane lit it up in the division two play-in/ability games in the grey pool with scores of 102-68 against the Austin O’Brien Crusaders and 86-59 against the J. Percy Page Panthers. Both teams competed in division three last season and the Panthers are making the jump into division two.
The first tournament for Paul Kane is this weekend at Queen Elizabeth High School and the opening game is against McNally Tigers, 2-9 as the last-place division two team that has dropped down into division three.
“We want to set a precedence for ourselves at this tournament,” MacPherson said. “We want to go as far as we can and win as much as we can this year, so we want to come into this tournament with the expectations to win it and we’re going to do everything we can to do that.”
League play tips off Monday against the host Panthers at 5:30 p.m.
“I can’t wait. It’s going to be a good year,” said MacPherson, one of five Grade 12s on the roster of which three are returnees.
“We’ve got three really good Grade 10 players,” added Eger, a sharpshooter with the 2007 metro premier conference champions and 4A provincial silver medallists during his Grade 12 season at Paul Kane who is back coaching the Blues with sidekick Mark Dobko for the second consecutive season.
Eger also coached the 2017 junior Bulldogs to the metro division two final.
MacPherson, 17, is the straw that stirs the drink for Paul Kane as the tallest player at six-foot-six in his Air Jordan shoes.
“Last year I had more of a bigger scoring role, but this year we have a lot of other guys that can do that so there are a lot of different roles I’m going to have to do this year and I want to be able to fill whatever they are,” said the third-year senior team player who hooped it up with Team Alberta at the U17 nationals in August at Kamloops.
Alberta finished fifth and one of the losses was against the eventual champions from Nova Scotia.
“It was a really good experience. I learned a lot from my coaches and playing with those teammates. The competition level was really good. It helped me a lot to grow as a player and as a person. I was able to see the game in a different way and a more advanced way," said MacPherson, a winger on the provincial team. “The role I had was to be a good defender and I had to be a good glue guy to help pull everything together. I had to do the fundamental stuff and a lot of intangible stuff.”
