Marshall ends Duquesne's victory streak at 6 games

Keith Dambrot isn’t a man who normally backs down from a challenge, and he’s not afraid to present one to his players when he believes it’s necessary.

When Duquesne’s coach met with his players at halftime of their eventual 82-71 loss to Marshall on Thursday night, he asked the impossible.

“I told them, ‘If you want to win, you have to be perfect in the second half,’ ” he said. “We made a big jump, but we weren’t perfect.”

Actually, imperfection is the best way to categorize the Dukes’ effort in their first loss after winning six in a row.

Duquesne committed 17 turnovers — 14 in the first half — and for the game shot 34.2% from the field (25 of 73), 52.9% from the foul line (9 of 17).

Contrast those numbers to Duquesne’s eight-game performance before Thursday: 47.5% from the field and an average of 11 turnovers over 40 minutes.

“We made 14 turnovers in the first half, and they’re not even pressing us,” Dambrot said.

Duquesne rallied in the second half, with plenty of hustle, a smoother offensive flow and only three turnovers.

But the game’s crucial minutes were the final five of the first half when Marshall (8-1) scored 16 unanswered points to build a 46-27 halftime margin. That turned out to be the deciding factor in the Thundering Herd’s eighth consecutive victory.

Dambrot called one timeout during the Marshall blitz, but he second-guessed himself for not calling more.

“I should have called a second or third timeout,” he said. “I thought we’d battle through it, and we didn’t.”

But the Dukes came out of their locker room with some fight and got back to what Dambrot called “the norm.”

After trailing by 21 after only 11 seconds of the second half, Duquesne made the game interesting by scoring 17 of the next 19 points — 14 from Jimmy Clark III — to trim the Marshall lead to 50-44 with 14 minutes, 17 seconds to play.

The Dukes kept grinding away at the deficit, with Dambrot leaning heavily on his starters. He believed that was necessary because he got only 16 points and 10 turnovers from five bench players.

“The bench was just OK,” Dambrot said. “We went with (starters) a long time, and I thought we were tired a little bit at the end.”

Nonetheless, Duquesne rallied to within four points of the lead, 63-59, on Tevin Brewer’s 3-pointer with five minutes left.

Marshall held a 70-65 lead with 2:47 to play, but that’s when fatigue might have caught up to the Dukes. Brewer missed a foul shot on a one-on-one opportunity, Dae Dae Grant misfired on a 3-pointer and Marshall took control.

Clark led Duquesne with s career-high 19 points, and Grant added 18. Tre Williams recorded a near double-double with 12 rebounds and nine points. Brewer contributed nine points, six assists and five rebounds, an impressive effort by the 5-foot-8 point guard.

Backup forward Austin Rotroff, 6-10, battled in the paint against Marshall’s big front line, played more than 23 minutes, grabbed 11 rebounds, blocked three shots and scored four points. Joe Reese, a former starter, returned after missing four games with an ankle injury and scored six points in 12 ½ minutes.

Among the crowd of 1,967 were scouts from four NBA teams, who were there to watch Marshall fifth-year guard Taevion Kinsey, who nearly hit his 20.5-point average with 19.

Aside from all the numbers, Dambrot was pleased to see how hard his team competed.

Proof of that are the Dukes’ 25 offensive rebounds, “which is a crazy number,” the coach said.

He liked how his players went hard to the boards, but that many offensive rebounds represent bad news, too.

“We missed a lot of shots,” he said.