After Duquesne’s last-place finish in the Atlantic 10 and a season-ending 17-game losing streak, Keith Dambrot had this to say Thursday morning:

“You can’t be ignorant. You have to make changes.”

The statement, of course, applies to the Dukes as Dambrot approaches his sixth season as their coach.

Except, at that point in a conversation Thursday with the Tribune-Review, he wasn’t talking about his team.

He was talking about his health.

Dambrot, who will turn 64 in two weeks, remains as energetic as he was the day he took the Duquesne job in 2017. He proved it by hitting the road in the offseason with his coaches and finding and signing 10 players for the 2022-23 season.

But he had a scare in the offseason when he passed out and was unconscious for about 50 seconds while playing pickleball with his wife, Donna. After Dambrot spent three days in the hospital, doctors decided he was merely dehydrated.

But he accepted the episode as a sign.

Dambrot had been drinking Diet Pepsi during games, but Donna suggested water was better. He switched to iced tea, but this season he’ll hydrate with water.

“I just thought I was drinking too much caffeine,” he said. “As I get older, I just felt like it wasn’t very healthy.”

His next quest is to steward Duquesne’s roster through its second significant makeover in the past two years.

Nine players left after last season, and Dambrot believes, this time, the replacements will be good for the program.

His plan had three goals:

• To get older in the backcourt.

• To add better depth in the frontcourt.

• To improve passing and shooting. Duquesne was last in the 14-team Atlantic 10 in points (65.2) and assists (10) per game and 13th in field goal percentage (40.3%).

How bad was the passing?

At their previous schools last season, new guards Tevin Brewer (FIU) and Dae Dae Grant (Miami, Ohio) combined for more total assists than the entire Duquesne team (301/300). Grant backed up his playmaking with 1,171 points; Brewer scored 760.

The bad news is Brewer is out indefinitely after getting his appendix removed this month. Dambrot doesn’t know when Brewer, ticketed to play point guard, will rejoin practice.

“Hard to tell,” he said. “His body will be his guide. He’s a tough guy. He’s a well-conditioned guy. So we’re optimistic.”

Grant (6 feet, 2 inches) and Brewer (5-8) are two of four transfers who have played a total of 269 career games (201 starts) at Division I schools. Joe Reece, a 6-8 forward, played at Old Dominion and Bowling Green, and Tre Clark III, a 6-3 guard, spent two seasons at VCU before leading Northwest Florida to the NJCAA championship last season.

The new players will join holdovers Kevin Easley Jr. and Tre Williams, a pair of 6-7 forwards who were the team’s leading rebounders last season (6.6/5.7). Plus, Dambrot is pleased with the return to health of 6-10 graduate student Austin Rotroff and 6-7 forward R.J. Gunn Jr. Rotroff was averaging 3.8 rebounds per game before injuring his foot and needing season-ending surgery. Gunn hurt his ankle and played in only one game.

After losing Williams for the last four games with a knee injury, the Dukes were severely shorthanded in the paint.

“We weren’t going to win at that point. It would have taken a minor miracle,” Dambrot said.

That’s when the Duquesne assistants went recruiting, missing games to jumpstart the rebuilding effort.

“We didn’t know how people would react to us recruiting them when we hadn’t won,” Dambrot said. “That turned out to be OK.”

The next step is the most important one — winning. Dambrot is optimistic, but it’s fair to ask why this roster reconstruction will work after last year’s did not.

“You have to be confident, don’t you?” Dambrot said. “We learned some lessons. If our business plan is correct and our execution is correct, then the rebuild should be pretty good.”

Dambrot isn’t bothered by the Atlantic 10 preseason poll that picks the Dukes to finish last.

“We can’t worry about what people think,” he said. “I understand why they picked us where they did. But, by the same token, last year is last year, and this year is this year. Nobody really knows, with the way the fluidity of college basketball and transfers and name, image and likeness.

“I don’t think it means anything, and I don’t really think it will have much of an effect on our guys.”

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