Tim Benz: For Duquesne, finding defensive consistency is key to a deep Atlantic 10 run
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When a college basketball team goes from 6-24 to 20-11 in one year, there shouldn’t be too many complaints from the head coach. Given those enjoyable circumstances for Duquesne’s Keith Dambrot, that has generally been the case this season.
But one thing Dambrot has pointed out is that he’d like to see more consistency from his team.
From game to game. Half to half. Even possession to possession. Dambrot has often cited advanced metric studies of his team’s performance, which indicate how erratic they can be even within segments of games they win.
To a certain extent, that hasn’t turned out badly for Duquesne, because the club has rarely gotten into an extended funk. It has lost back-to-back games just once in the conference season — a two-game losing streak against St. Bonaventure and Fordham in late January.
But in order to win the Atlantic 10 tournament as the No. 6 seed and advance to the school’s first NCAA Tournament since 1977, the Dukes must be good enough to string together a four-game win streak.
“I think as the tournament goes, we have a little bit of an advantage because we have pretty good depth. I don’t know if it helps you early in the tournament, but it helps you later in the tournament because we can play 10 guys, whereas most people don’t have 10 guys. Or don’t want to play 10 guys,” Dambrot said Monday.
The Dukes did stack a four-game conference winning streak to open February, beating George Washington, George Mason, St. Bonaventure and Saint Joseph’s. Granted, three of those games were against teams behind them in the final standings. But at least Dambrot’s team showed that it could be done.
“We were better defensively during that four-game stretch, especially the first half against St. Joe’s,” Dambrot said.
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The numbers illustrate Dambrot’s point. His players yielded just 24 points in that first half against Hawks, who were fourth in the A-10 in scoring at 72.5 points per game. Over those four games, Duquesne gave up a meager 58.7 points per game, a pace that would’ve led the A-10 if stretched over the course of the season. Dayton ended up with the conference’s best defense at 60.8 points per game.
In the last five games of the regular season, though, Duquesne went 2-3 with opponents scoring at a clip of 80.2 points per game, well above Duquesne’s 70.5 average. So what happened during that spell?
“It could be matchups. It could be style of play. Could be not as good defensively. Could be a combination,” Dambrot said.
Center Austin Rotroff also noticed a direct correlation between the team’s improved defensive attention to detail during their four-game win streak last month and the end results — starting with the 93-67 victory at George Washington on Feb. 4.
“I think that game really showed us that if we lock in defensively, we are really capable of beating anybody,” Rotroff said. “We just tried to build on it, and we got a sense of defensive confidence within our group game-to-game locking in on our scouting report. We did a really good job of that. We need to get back to that.”
Forward Joe Reece said that when the Dukes were at their best early last month, the defensive execution carried over to the offensive end as well.
“We were having fun. Everybody was involved. Offensively. Defensively. We were sharing the ball,” Reece said. “Seeing it all come together, seeing everybody being utilized and accepting their roles, it’s fun to watch. It showed during that four-game stretch.”
The Dukes’ first conference tournament game in Brooklyn, N.Y., is Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. versus La Salle. Duquesne won the only matchup between the clubs this year, a 91-74 victory in Philadelphia on Feb. 22, with Reece leading the way thanks to 26 points on 11-of-13 shooting.
That was perhaps Duquesne’s most consistent offensive game of the year, shooting 55% from the floor, scoring 41 points in the first half and 50 in the second half.
If they can replicate that offensive execution and put forth a defensive effort to match, the Dukes could find themselves one-fourth of the way toward their goal of a spot in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 46 years.