The Northwestern Lehigh boys basketball team had a lot of experience on last year’s squad that reached the state playoffs. The down side to that is that the Tigers graduated five players from that team.

The good news is that there is still a solid nucleus of experience for them to draw from since they still have six seniors on this year’s team that opens play Monday at Saucon Valley.

Even with the remaining experience, the team has some deep losses to overcome this season. Gone are 1,000-point scorer Sam Yadush and last year’s leading scorer Derek Thomas, two players who will be difficult for coach Billy Hallman to replace.

“It’s going to be a team effort and they sort of embrace that,” said Hallman. “We lost Sam Yadush, he was important for us with his scoring and ball handling-wise, so we don’t have your prototypical point guard this year. We lost Devin Thomas’ scoring and again, we can’t replace all of that with one guy, so it’s going to be a team effort this year to pick up what we lost. We’re going to do it as a team.”

Deven Bollinger, who was third on the team with just under 10 points per game last season, is back for his senior season. Senior Sean McCann was among the league leaders with 40 three-pointers last season and will be counted on to play much that same role since Yadush was the other deep sharpshooter for the Tigers. Luke Hallman comes into his senior season after having his past two seasons cut short by knee injuries, but is healthy and ready to compete.

Among underclassmen, Hallman is looking to a few guys who have shown in practice that they want to pick up some of the slack and get more varsity playing time this season. The emergence of young players has been a pleasant surprise for Hallman.

“Nick Henry and Andres Garrido have already stepped up in the first two weeks,” said Billy Hallman. “Cayden Fitch, a freshman, is already pushing to get on the court, so we’ll mix those guys in. R.J. Zack is a junior who is long and lanky and does everything right and with Deven [Bollinger], a senior, we’ve got a pretty good rotation. We’re going to be deeper than I thought we were even a week ago.”

Northwestern made it to the semifinals of districts last season and qualified for the PIAA tournament, but lost in the first round of states. This season, it may seem that the Tigers set their sights lower, but Hallman believes that doing something they haven’t been able to do since he took over the team could be a boost to bigger and better things in districts and states.

“We set our goals,” he said. “We haven’t made the league tournament since I’ve been here, so that’s goal number-one. I think to make the league tournament sort of sets you up. We qualified for the state tournament last year, which was a great experience, but these guys aren’t satisfied with just getting there, they want to get there again and win at least one game.”

Hallman has experienced players and the newfound depth will also help him throughout the season. The final piece of the puzzle may come from the fact that the team has a number of football players on the roster who didn’t like the way their season ended in districts thanks to a couple of highly disputed calls by officials. In being around the players, Hallman has seen where that disappointment has added an edge to much of his team.

“We’ve got a couple of football guys, too, who still have a little bit of a sour taste in their mouth,” Billy Hallman said. “They had a great season, but it ended a little sour, so that may help us a little bit.”