Boys basketball preview
Everybody’s gunning for Nicolet, and the Knights know it.
With his basketball team tucked into the gym at Nicolet High School, Allan Hanson wastes no time ratcheting up the intensity at practice.
Many are eyeing the Knights as the Division 2 state championship favorite, but during the opening moments of a practice over a week before its first game, Nicolet is more concerned about watching its layups go through the net.
With two pairs of scorers and rebounders going at once, the team has two minutes to make 40 left-handed layups. If they come up short, they have to do it over. If they fail to reach 40 again, they keep going back until they hit 40. Sweet-talking the coaching staff won’t work. If a player misses a few layups, he’s on the baseline running gassers.
“We come in and we practice like we have a target on our backs,” Knights junior Jalen Johnson said. “Every game we play, we’re going to get every team’s best game. It’s high intensity. We’ve got to bring it because teams aren’t going to be playing around with us this year.”
Johnson, a 6-foot-8 small forward, is perhaps the player with the most eyes on him in the state this season.
After shooting up recruiting ranking boards in his sophomore season at Sun Prairie, Johnson and his younger brother, Kobe, transferred to Nicolet before the 2018-'19 school year.
It was about as high-profile as a move
can be at the high school level.
“I didn’t know he was coming here until he went online and announced it,” senior guard Sonny Phinisee said. “Twitter blew up, Instagram blew up, my Snapchat blew up, all that. It was crazy.”
Jalen is ranked No. 4 nationally in the class of 2020 by 247 Sports, and his current list of scholarship offers is a who’s who of college basketball, including Duke, Kansas and Kentucky.
Kobe, a talented sophomore, played on junior varsity for most of last season at Sun Prairie but has garnered attention through his play on the AAU circuit and will figure prominently in the Knights’ rotation this year.
"Kobe's under-the-radar," Jalen said. "I think give it about seven to eight months and he’ll be getting known like I am now. He’s a great player."
WIAA rules deem student-athletes entering their junior or senior years ineligible for varsity competition “unless the transfer is made necessary by a total and complete change in residence by parent(s).”
The Johnson family made the move to the district, where Jalen, Kobe and Nicolet are looking to take the area by storm, and were cleared to play.
“It was just time for a change,” Jalen said. “We have a lot of family out here, so my family and I just felt it was right and at the right time just for a change.”
Hanson, who doesn’t work at Nicolet during the day, said he was taken by surprise with the Johnsons' announcement.
“I haven’t had any involvement in it,” Hanson said. “Obviously, school was starting and they were here. I’m not in the building during the day or anything like that. They moved to the Milwaukee area, they looked for a great school that provided the criteria they were looking for as a family.”
The transfers don’t end there for the Knights, as sophomore wing James Graham is now at Nicolet after averaging nearly 8 points per game at University School a season ago.
The Knights, who also feature another nationally ranked junior prospect in forward Jamari Sibley in addition to a strong supporting cast, have heard the comments, questions and accusations about building a preps “super team.” They are also looking to leave those behind them.
“We hear it a lot,” Sibley said. “To just block it out, we just try to do everything positive.
“Don’t do anything that looks bad. That’s pretty much it.
“They can’t say anything when we aren’t doing anything wrong. We just have to prove everybody wrong, all the
Nicolet junior Jamari Sibley rises up for a slam dunk during practice on Monday.
politics, and just do us.”
Sibley and Jalen Johnson have known each other for five years through AAU teams, including recently on the high-level Phenom University team.
“When I found out he was coming to Nicolet, I couldn’t believe it,” said Sibley, who has scholarship offers from Arizona State, Florida, Iowa, Marquette and more. “My best friend was coming.”
There aren’t many more pairs of best friends recruited more highly than Sibley and Johnson.
“Recruiting is going great,” Sibley said. “Some visits are lining up, but I’ve been a little too busy for me to go on my officials now.
“A lot of schools are picking up, like UCLA, Ohio State, Texas. A lot of those big schools, like Kansas, they’re going to offer soon.”
Add the rest of Nicolet’s expected contributors and the roster looks formidable.
The other key returning players from last season include Phinisee, guard David Rosengarden and 6-8 forward Jarrett Henderson, who transferred to Nicolet from Sheboygan South before the 2017-'18 school year. The team also was planning to add another Division I prospect, but guard Desmond Polk’s transfer waiver request from New Berlin West to Nicolet was denied.
It doesn’t take much to see why the Knights practice with the level of intensity that they do.
“We talk about it. We have a target on our back. We know we do,” Phinisee said. “So in practice, we go at it with each other so that in the game it comes easier to us.”