Erik Szylard Daenitz for The New York Times
Lone Peak High School center Eric Mika, third from left, during introductions before a game at Lehi High School. Mika has committed to B.Y.U.
HIGHLAND, Utah — Here, among a string of quiet Mormon towns, where the spires of Latter-day Saints churches glint against the Wasatch Mountains, is the home of what many consider the nation's best high schoolboys' basketball team.
Erik Szylard Daenitz for The New York Times
Lone Peak, in the dark uniforms against Lehi, built a 23-1 record while winning by an average of nearly 28 points a game.
For the past two years, the Knights of Lone Peak High School, a team of lanky, long-armed teenagers who look only slightly more imposing than a chess club, have not just been beating opponents, they have been crushing them.
At 23-1, the Knights have been ranked as the best high school team in the country for more than a month by the Web site Max Preps and are working their way through the Utah state playoffs, which end Saturday. While Lone Peak has lost to in-state opponents just three times in the past three years, its success nationally is especially surprising. The Knights have won by an average of nearly 28 points this season, including tournament victories over top teams from Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.
"There was one team we played that was literally laughing when we were warming up," the senior center Eric Mika said with a chuckle. "And we beat them by 50."
Unlike many top high school teams that lure talented players from outside their immediate area, Lone Peak, which has a student body of about 2,300, pulls players from the pruned streets of Alpine and Highland — small communities tucked in the foothills about 30 miles from Salt Lake City, so named by Mormon settlers because the landscape reminded them of the Swiss Alps and Scottish Highlands.
The Knights — led by Mika and guards Nick Emery and T. J. Haws — have ascended to the top of the national rankings as relative unknowns, a feat made more remarkable by the simple fact that they hail from a region not recognized for basketball prowess.
"We know we're different whenever we walk into a gym," said Coach Quincy Lewis, who has a 206-35 record over the past decade. "But our guys walk in there with a chip on their shoulder. We know we have something to prove because, honestly, the other teams don't have a great deal of respect for us."
Then Lone Peak starts playing. Its style is a fearless, careening brand of basketball, built on 3-pointers, lobs and dunks, seemingly more suited for a playground than the movie "Hoosiers."
"They play like inner-city teams; how blacks consider black teams play," said Tyrone Slaughter, who coaches Whitney Young High School in Chicago, which is ranked seventh in the country. "I don't know any other way to put it.
"So many times we see the predominantly white teams play a conservative style, a precise style of basketball," he said. "When you see this team play, it is completely different."
Last season, Lone Peak beat Whitney Young in a double-overtime game at the Beach Ball Classic tournament in Myrtle Beach, S.C., a performance that helped burnish its reputation.
Emery set the tournament's four-game scoring record with 119 points. Word of the Knights' lopsided victories spread around Chicago. Now, Slaughter said, if a team is blown out, it is said to have been Lone Peaked.
The most apparent reason for the team's success is the triumvirate of Mika, Emery and Haws, players, Lewis says, who "don't come around very often for anybody, I don't care what program you're a part of."
The 6-foot-2 senior Emery, who averages 19 points, and the 6-4 junior Haws, who scores 17 a game, are continuing a family tradition at Lone Peak.
Emery's older brother, Jackson, who graduated from the school in 2005, was named Utah's Mr. Basketball and was a co-captain at Brigham Young with Jimmer Fredette.
Haws's older brother, Tyler, was also a Lone Peak standout and was 10th in the country in scoring with a 20.9 points-a-game average at B.Y.U. entering Tuesday's games. The 6-foot-10 Mika, who averages 16 points, is in his first season at Lone Peak after transferring from a private school, but he has known Haws and Emery since they were fourth graders playing on youth teams together.
"I feel this is really a once-in-a-life team," said Haws, who can make 3-pointers from beyond the N.B.A. range or slash through the lane with moves that have earned him YouTube fame.
Lewis has coached many of his players since grade school at clinics and camps. Every summer, he takes the team to play against Amateur Athletic Union squads around the country.
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