The Delaware Blue Coats opened up the Tip-Off Tournament portion of the season by welcoming the Westchester Knicks to Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington for a Saturday matinee. JP Clark’s squad put on a very impressive all-around display in his first game as head coach for the Philadelphia 76ers' G League affiliate, as they waltzed to victory.
Both teams came out of the gates with boundless energy, eager to get underway after a long summer. The Knicks’ Donovan Williams scored the first points of the season on a long-distance shot. 76ers’ second-round pick, Johni Broome, scored the first bucket of the season for the Blue Coats on a nifty cut that went for a dunk. From there, the Blue Coats settled into their rhythm and would go on to put together a very sound quarter on both sides of the ball.
The Blue Coats registered five steals and eight total turnovers against the Knicks in the first quarter and made them pay for it on the other end. The Blue Coats were a perfect 4-4 from the field on the fast break in the opening frame.
The team domination did not stop there. All nine Blue Coat players to touch the floor scored points in the first, and all of them had a positive plus-minus. In contrast, all 10 Knicks to hit the floor in the first had a negative plus-minus. Led by 21 combined points from MarJon Beauchamp, Hunter Sallis, and Kennedy Chandler, the Blue Coats ended the first quarter with a double-digit lead, 41-31.
The Knicks were the much more aggressive team to start the second quarter as they looked to mount an early comeback. Trey Jemison had his fingerprints all over the early minutes of the quarter, scoring multiple times on hook shots from the post and doing all the dirty work around the rim.
After Jemison helped to keep a possession alive that led to a Dink Pate layup that cut the Blue Coats' lead to 55-53, the home team locked back in. It took the Blue Coats all of 1:18 of gametime to stretch the lead back out to double-digits. Malcolm Hill hit two shots from behind the arc, Hunter Sallis deposited a driving floater, Hill then ripped the ball from the Knicks and passed it to Marcus Bagley for another three-ball and suddenly it was 66-53 and the Blue Coats had complete control again.
Johni Broome and Hunter Sallis took that positive momentum and helped grow the lead heading into halftime. Contributions from Igor Milicic Jr. and Kennedy Chandler cannot be overlooked. Chandler was a blur of creativity and craftiness, getting to whatever spot he wanted to on the floor and keeping the Knicks' defense constantly collapsing and leaving shooters open on the perimeter. He finished the first half with 11 points and six assists. Milicic had a very important eight points of his own with his ability to stretch the floor with his shooting.
Aside from that tiny lapse to start the second quarter, the Blue Coats were the far superior team in the first half and went to the locker room with a 79-62 lead.
The second half started with some sloppy play from the Knicks. Pressing to try and claw back into the game before it was too late, the Knicks gave away the ball three times in the opening two minutes of the quarter, which prompted an early timeout from DeSagana Diop.
Whatever message was said in the huddle worked as the Knicks began to mount their comeback run from there. The Blue Coats went ice cold from the field over the middle portion of the quarter as the Knicks chipped away possession by possession. When the Knicks cut the lead to 18, JP Clark called a timeout of his own to get his guys refocused before the dam broke open.
Johni Broome steadied the ship by putting in a couple of buckets to ease the tensions for the home team. Luckily, the lead was so large that the Blue Coats never were in actual danger of giving it away, but Clark clearly understood the pulse of the game when it came to his decision-making and that is encouraging to see from a first-time head coach in his first game. His Blue Coats entered the final frame with a lead of 103-87.
The rest of the game was simply a formality, with the Westchester Knicks really having no chance of making the Blue Coats sweat in crunch time. Any hope was certainly dashed when Kennedy Chandler knocked down two three-pointers and Marcus Bagley hit one of his own on consecutive possessions to balloon the lead to 21 points with just over six minutes left.
The Blue Coats ended up having 12 more assists, 10 more steals, three more blocks, eight fewer fouls, and 22 (!) fewer turnovers than the Knicks. They did, however, get outrebounded pretty severely, which is something to monitor moving forward, but forcing 30 turnovers makes that rebound disparity moot. They controlled every other aspect of the game en route to a decisive 134-113 victory, the first of JP Clark’s head coaching career.
Asked after the game what this win means to him on a personal level, Clark said, “It’s super exciting. More proud of the group at this moment than myself. Just happy with how we responded, we’ve been working hard for three weeks. For us to not have a scrimmage and come in and play with that kind of intensity and pace is something I was really proud of.”
If this first game is any indication of things to come, this Blue Coats team is going to be a well-connected offensive machine at the very least. Every single Blue Coat who played scored in double-figures. They registered 32 assists on 51 made baskets. They got 106 shots up in regulation and it did not feel forced nor out of structure.
When asked about that team-wide offensive balance, MarJon Beauchamp said, “We were just running and trusting each other. We have a lot of talent. We were just trusting the next pass and everybody can get a bucket, so we were just running in transition and trying to get steals. I still think we need to get a little better on the defensive rebounding but other than that, I think it was great for our first game.”
