With point guard sidelined, Duquesne men forced to deal with obstacles early on
Share this post:
The year 2022 has proven to be one chock-full of bad luck for Duquesne men’s basketball.
Down the stretch of last season, the Dukes lost forwards Austin Rotroff and Tre Williams to season-ending injuries in the span of about a month.
That was on top of a preseason injury to fellow forward R.J. Gunn, which limited him to just four minutes played.
The devastation to the frontcourt contributed significantly to Duquesne’s 17-game losing streak to end the 2021-22 campaign, which saw the team post a 6-24 record (1-16 Atlantic 10).
Coach Keith Dambrot and his assistants navigated through a busy offseason, managing major roster turnover and restocking the Dukes with 10 new players, transfers and true freshman included.
One such new face, graduate transfer Tevin Brewer, was expected to take the reins at point guard following a successful career at Florida International, where he averaged 11.5 points and shot nearly 39% from the field in 66 career starts.
But Brewer has proved to be yet another injury casualty. After suffering complications from appendectomy surgery in October, Brewer is out indefinitely. Dambrot has not been able to offer specifics as to when he can be expected to take the court again.
“This is a medical issue, so we’re not going to make the call on that,” he said. “That’s going to be the doctors and surgeons who will decide all of that.”
Dambrot will undoubtedly look forward to Brewer’s recovery and return, but ahead of Duquesne’s season opener Tuesday vs. Montana, he has been strategizing about who will be running the point.
Dambrot said freshmen Kareem Rozier and Matus Hronsky, sophomore JUCO transfer Quincy McGriff (Salt Lake Community College) and junior Dae Dae Grant, a Miami, Ohio transfer, have all earned practice reps.
While Grant played some point guard in high school and for the RedHawks, he fits better into the traditional two-guard spot, with Dambrot noting that as a projected key scorer within the backcourt, he is hesitant to mess with Grant’s rhythm by switching his position.
McGriff appears cut of a similar cloth as Grant — more useful playing off the ball — while Hronsky, a 6-foot-8 first-year player from Slovakia, is a forward.
That leaves Rozier as the most logical on-paper solution to fill the void left by Brewer’s absence.
While lacking Brewer’s experience, the two are similar in build (Rozier is 5-foot-9, 160 pounds compared to Brewer at 5-8 and 160), with presumably related playing styles.
“I am a true point guard, which is a pass-first point guard, and that’s what I love to do,” Rozier said. “I love assists – assists are like scoring to me. Getting my guys involved is what I love to do, but when the shot is there, I’ll take it.”
While Dambrot feels his overall depth this year has improved, the early part of the Dukes’ season — and, for that matter, however long Brewer is out — will be a sink-or-swim test without their starting point guard.
“Arguably, you could say if you take one of the best point guards off of any team in this league, they’re not going to be as good,” Dambrot said. “You take Yuri Collins away from St. Louis or you take Malachi Smith away from Dayton or Ace Baldwin at VCU, they may survive it but they’re not going to be as good.
“That’s what we have to do right now. We have to survive it until we go full blown. But injuries are part of this, so you can’t make excuses about it.”
Of course, there is far more to Duquesne’s story heading into this season than the situation at point guard.
Along with Williams, who was averaging 10.8 points and 5.7 rebounds before his injury in late February, the Dukes return fellow junior forward Kevin Easley Jr., who was one of the rocks for Dambrot last year, averaging 10.7 points and a team-high 6.6 rebounds while shooting 39.9% from the floor.
Reinforcing Rotroff and Gunn is senior Joe Reece, a Bowling Green transfer who previously played three seasons at Old Dominion, and 6-foot-9 freshmen David Dixon and Halil Barre, both of whom will get a chance to enter the mix as depth pieces.
While Duquesne possesses perimeter scoring potential in Grant and Rozier, along with McGriff and JUCO alum Jimmy “Tre” Clark (Northwest Florida), Dambrot believes the true offensive potential for his 2022-23 club is down low.
“I feel like we have much better depth in the frontcourt,” he said. “…We’ve got a lot of guys in those spots. The biggest key is whether we can consistently score it on the low box. If we can do that, then we become different than a lot of teams, and I think that’s what we’re trying to develop — what the best way to do it is.”
For all the talk of offensive production and where it will come from, Duquesne has a laundry list of things to shore up defensively, given that it allowed the highest three-point (39.8%) and second-highest field goal conversion rates (47.6) across the Atlantic 10.
“I think we’re in a pretty good spot right now,” Grant said. “I think we’re a good defensive team, but there’s always room for improvement on our defensive end, as well as offense. But that’s where championships and games are won, on the defensive end.”
The Dukes begin their season by hosting Montana — a team picked by league media to finish third in the 10-member Big Sky Conference — at 7 p.m. Tuesday.