Warren gets well against Mundelein

So, maybe practice doesn’t make perfect after all.

The Warren boys basketball team supposedly had some really bad practices last week.

Guys were hurt and sick, and the entire team seemed a bit sluggish in going through the motions.

“It wasn’t good,” Warren forward Darius Paul said. “We were pretty sick.”

And yet, on Saturday at Mundelein, the Blue Devils seemed not only well-prepared, but about as well-oiled and as polished as could be. Like practice had been nothing but smooth sailing all week.

Warren jumped out to a commanding lead in the first quarter and never took its foot off the gas in cruising to a 74-54 North Suburban Conference Lake Division victory over the host Mustangs.

The Blue Devils, who finished with four players in double-figures, improve to 18-3 overall and remain in the driver’s seat in the race for the Lake Division crown. They are still perfect in division play at 8-0.

Mundelein drops to 21-4 overall and 6-3 in the Lake. Two of the Mustangs’ Lake Division losses have come to Warren.

“To be honest with you, we didn’t practice well at all this week,” Warren coach Chuck Ramsey said. “We kind of hit a wall, especially health-wise. A lot of guys just weren’t feeling good.

“Probably not having a game (on Friday night) helped us. We were able to get some good rest, and we had good energy out here tonight.”

Especially at the beginning.

Warren reeled off the first 10 points of the game before Mundelein scored its first points with 2:21 left in the first quarter.

The Blue Devils ended the quarter with a 15-4 advantage and ballooned that to a 16-point lead at halftime.

“We came out hot,” said the 6-foot-6 Paul, who racked up a team-high 19 points and was part of a punishing interior attack that Mundelein could never match. “There was really nothing (Mundelein) could do.

“We (Warren’s post players) work together (inside) a lot. We have a good chemistry with our passes and we get a lot of easy buckets.”

Meanwhile, almost nothing came easily for the Mustangs.

They missed their first 10 shots of the game, and that seemed to set the tone for the night.

Mundelein connected on just 30 percent of its shots overall.

And leading scorers Robert Knar and Ryan Sawvell were taken out of their games.

They wound up with 26 and 14 points respectively for the Mustangs, but most came in the second half well after the game had gotten out of hand.

They accounted for just 4 field goals between them in the first half.

“I think we came out really tentative,” said Knar, who scored 9 of his 21 second-half points at the free throw line. “We came out scared. And they were definitely playing hard.

“They’re big and we’re a small team and that was definitely a challenge for us. We let them use their height in their half-court offense and we can’t do that.”

Besides Knar and Sawvell, no one else reached double-figures for Mundelein.

Warren, which went up by as many as 24 points in the fourth quarter, got 16 points from JoVaughn Gaines, 11 points from Jeremiah Jackson and 10 points from Brandon Ferguson.

“We weren’t making shots,” Mundelein coach Dick Knar said. “But the biggest problem was that we let them get the ball in the middle to all their big guys. We were trying to jump with those guys and they’re tall and big and that’s hard to do.”