After winning the Rumble in the Jungle tournament at Gilbert High School and starting their season with four wins, the Mountain Pointe High School boys basketball team looks to prove that the past offseason wasn’t actually taken off.

However, it wasn’t just a matter of pulling together as a program and finding ways to replace seniors and make scheme adjustments. The team had a lot more to figure out this spring and summer.

Since that final buzzer went off and the Pride walked off the floor after a road loss to Chandler, many things have gone on behind the scenes.

Here’s what has happened over the past few months and what Mountain Pointe is looking at in for 2017-18 season.

New Coach

Hosea Graham deciding to step down after three seasons of being the head coach came as a surprise to the athletic department. But with the spot vacant, Mountain Pointe began the search to find a replacement.

Graham had one winning season in his three campaigns as the head coach since the 2015-16 season. He achieved a combined record of 36-40 throughout those three seasons and went 11-15 in his final year. In the 2015-16 season, the Pride did make a playoff run, the school's first since 2012-13.

Mountain Pointe found his replacement in a somewhat unlikely candidate ... Duane Eason.

Eason previously coached at Phoenix College as an assistant, where the team earned a 25-7 record before bowing out in the region finals. He also coached in New Jersey for a while before that stint at Phoenix College.

His hiring seemed unlikely because he is new to Arizona. When Graham was hired, he had previously been a junior varsity coach at Mountain Pointe, but with a man relatively inexperienced with high school ball in Arizona, it would be somewhat of a gamble.

Eason may not be ingrained into the Arizona high school basketball scene yet, but that allows for him to bring a new philosophy into the picture. However, it hasn’t been an entirely smooth transition for Eason bringing his coaching style into Mountain Pointe.

“It’s asking someone to basically take something that’s almost like a regional mindset and convert it to a regional mindset that they’ve never even seen or been around,” Eason said. “Coming from New Jersey it’s just a big difference in terms of basketball culture.”

Luckily, Eason said that the initial hurdle of translating his mindset to the new team is largely over and that the communication is much better now that they’ve had time to grow accustomed to each other.

This is a sentiment that junior guard Khalid Price echoed when talking about the adjustments the team had to make with new leadership and their early difficulties largely starting over.

“We started off rough,” Price said. “But we picked it up because coach seems to really know what he’s talking about and everything is starting to fall into place.”

The main differences between Graham and Eason according to the players is commonly said to be intensity. Multiple players said that the required energy at practiced spiked with Eason's arrival and. That is reflected when watching the practices.

Eason is very vocal and not shy about letting players know when they’re messing up. He won’t back away from singling a player out if he isn't hustling. It isn’t uncommon to see players go into a state of frustration when Eason corrects them. It isn’t subtle, it isn’t nice.

But when looking at their play after Eason's coaching improvement is clearly visible and tensions fall away once practice is over.

Defensive Focus

In today’s basketball climate, the main focus of the sport seems to be offense. Defense feels like more and more of an afterthought as the years continue.

Eason came into the program at Mountain Pointe looking to instead develop the players as defenders.

“With high school [players] it’s more so being a teenager,” Eason said when asked about if getting younger players to buy into a defensive heavy plan was difficult or not.

Looking back to last season, the Pride gave up an average of about 64 points per game with the national average of points allowed per game sitting at 55.4.

In practice they do a lot of press drills, they go over assignments on defense, and, of course, they condition. Conditioning is an important part of their development as defenders, which actually goes hand in hand with the intensity of the practices under Eason.

But they don’t just set aside the last 20-30 minutes for conditioning in practice. They don’t really have to. Watching the players at practice puts into perspective just why they are able to play relentless defense for the entirety of the game.

After a few months of the new coaching, senior guard Amarion Cash said he’s already felt the change because of the focus on defense.

“The program is moving in a positive way; we’re way more intense on defense,” Cash said.

It started in the summer leagues. According to Eason, his team only gave up more than 40 points a handful of times. In the most recent tournament, they gave up an average of 46.7 points per game. It is a small sample size, but enough to establish a change when viewed with the summer numbers given by Eason.

Focus on defense also helps gel a team together, according to Eason. He wants the team to focus on defense because it’s a group effort. He said from what he’s seen it allows for teammates to not only learn to work together faster but to develop trust within each other because the defense only can work if everyone is doing their job.

Ryan Pate, senior forward, seems to confirm the hypothesis Eason had about team comradery built by defense.

“In past years we were kind of separated,” Pate said. “This year I feel like we’re more together; we’re all brothers.”

Concerns

Four games into the 2017-2018 season, the Pride sported an undefeated record after defeating opponents Chandler, Westview, Pinnacle and regional rival Desert Ridge at Welcome to the Jungle.

Beating Desert Ridge is important because when looking at the record in region games in past seasons, it has been the biggest struggle. The Pride's combined record for the past seven seasons is 99-87 overall, however when looking just at regional games, they are just 38-57. Even in seasons like 2012-13 and 2015-16, where the Pride had a winning record, they struggled with region play.

One of the biggest X-factors in high school sports is region play, it also can reflect the true nature of a team. Because most regional games take place in the latter half of the season, there are higher expectations of teams because they’ve had a large part of the season to make adjustments and figure out issues within the squad.

It is important to point this out because usually Mountain Pointe starts off their seasons looking like a winning team.

When looking at the first six games of the season, which usually includes four tournament games and the first two games of the regular season, since the 2010-11 campaign, the Mountain Pointe Pride have won 31 of 42 games, or about an average of 4.4 games out of the 6 at the beginning of each season. Compare that to their final six games in the same season, not including playoff games, and they have won a mere 16 of 42, meaning they are victorious about 2.3 times out of their final 6 contests, on average.

In order to be successful and make a possible playoff run, the Pride must figure out how to not only win early on in tournaments like the one over Thanksgiving week and the games in late December and early January, but also in region play. Overall records do help establish power rankings somewhat, but regional wins and losses are really the outcomes looked at when determining who is in or out once the beginning of February has arrived.

Looking Ahead

Teams like Corona del Sol, Gilbert and Desert Vista have consistently topped the 6A Central standings the past few seasons. However, this revamp that the Pride have undergone in the spring and summer has not gone unnoticed, especially with their tournament crown to start the season.

On November 20, AZCentral listed Mountain Pointe the No. 4-ranked team in 6A. The only team in its region ranked ahead on that list is Desert Vista, who came in at No. 2. This is a pretty quick turnaround considering the changes the Pride had to make in the offseason.

It remains to be seen how well the Pride will stack up to conference opponents this season and how they’ll perform as the regular season rolls on, but this is a promising start to the 2017-18 season.