Ironduke81 wrote:

indygjm wrote:

It appears that Duquesne lost 68% of its scoring to the transfer portal.  The only other A10 team with a worse % was LaSalle at 87% (understandable with a new coach).  The top teams in the league - Davidson, Dayton, Bonaventure and Richmond are at 25% or fewer.  I can't see how you are going to throw all these new players together and generate the team chemistry you see with mature rosters.  I'd love to be wrong.  But, I think we are going to have another poor year.  Maybe we win 7 games?

That’s a very good point. Team chemistry takes time. Look at Richmond’s run this year. I guess Coach Dambrot will be forced to dumb down his intricate offensive schemes. 😂

One of my favorite courses at DU was Logic and the study of fallacies. One of the most common ones is the "Because of this, therefore this" fallacy.  So, if you remove 68 percent of the scoring from a horrible shooting team who struggled to score 50 points and could not play defense, and replace it with better shooters who are bigger stronger and can defend necessarily follow that it will be a poor season? 

Dambrot is not done recruiting and if we can land grant, our starting lineup could be a very mature team.  Brewer a grad PG, Grant a junior SG, Easley a grad SF, Williams a junior PF, and hopefully a seasoned center.  We will also have a much better bench, not the collection of dead wood we had last season.  I am optimistic from what I see so far and we will be a much better team.  I don't know what that translates into victories or position in the League but I believe we will be much more competitive, and who knows.   

NapaDuke wrote:

Hima is going to be a good pickup on any team with a fast pace style of play. Very few 7 foot players played 6 years of soccer. He may be short on basketball experience, but has likely more mobility to get up and down the court than most 7 footers. It's hard to figure what his progress would have been with more playing time in the OOC, but played his first full game against Davidson and was effective. What he doesn't have is experience and that can be learned, but what he does have can't be taught. This was a big lose, but KD isn't the kind of coach to center his game around Hima. So, smart move for Hima, I hope the best for him.   

Good post.  Other posters are saying Hima was too "raw" and his numbers were bad but the guy never got the chance to play?!!  Duquesne will not get a big, seasoned, center through the portal - those types of players are coveted by everyone and there are not enough to trickle down to Duquesne.  Duquesne needs to recruit and and develop one - HIMA!  and yet KD completely ignored him.  This would have been understood on a team that was top 3 in the conference and Hima was too far down the depth chart but he wasted away on the bench on a .500 team and then one of the worst in Div ! basketball.  

We had our Big Center on the roster for 3 seasons and failed to develop him.  Had he been developed properly, he would be the exact player we are looking for right now!  

We saw little of his game but what we saw showed he was not a bum who would never get it.  This isn't the ACC - Hima could have been a good to very good center in the A-10.

Yup, he could have been a solid A10 center.   All he needed to do was mature and develop 2 post moves and he could have been all conference.   Coaching let him down.

I dont know what that means.

I am disappointed by this one too. I can’t say I’m surprised by this given the way he was handled; but he was one of the few, if not the lone player, who looked like he actually wanted to be on the floor down the dreadful stretch run of this season. I don’t remember which one of the blowouts but I remember seeing multiple players telling him multiple times to calm down since we were down like 20 with 3 minutes left. He didn’t care. He wanted to be out there playing basketball and developing his game. So I thought he’d be back. He is certainly very raw, but he was arguably already our best option at the 5 and should have gotten much more time to develop and he’d be further along.

Mo chose where he was going today… Syracuse. Yep.

Can anyone explain to me how we can basically dismiss a player who is then scooped up by a power 5 program, albeit not a program currently at its best? This is really disappointing to me all the way around! Raises some interesting questions in my mind too!

Last edited by El Presidente (5/11/2022 4:00 pm)

Does make one wonder.

I said this wasn't a good sign a few weeks ago and I'll say it again...and Dambrot needs to learn how to handle players who "can" leave.  In the past, they were stuck and he could be how he wanted...there was really no where for them to immediately go.  But now...and all of us could go on with the list of players that did so well last year after they left.  I hope some people now get it that if Dambrot  doesn't change his relationships wirth players, this is going to go on until he leaves and these last two years will be the NORM.  You listening to the NOISE yet Dave Harper????

Not sure where to begin. 

I’m not going to dump on a college kid. So, I will just say Hima has a long way to go to be a contributor. I hope he gets there. He’s 7 foot. Ain’t a lot of them. Certainly worth the chance. Maybe that’s the reason Syracuse offered.  But to jump to the conclusion that because he signed with Syracuse means he would have succeeded here is a leap. 

Also a huge leap to say his leaving was because Dambrot can’t form relationships, blah, blah, blah.  If I’m not mistaken Dambrot’s whole staff played for him. Must have been able to form relationships at one time. He must have forgotten how to bond with his players. Right? That has to be it.  I’m not saying he doesn’t have to adapt. He might. A lot of coaches probably need to adapt.

Maybe Mark Schmidt needs to change. He either can’t relate to today’s player or he’s forgotten how to do so. Right? I’m mean damn near his whole team left Bona.  It has to be his fault! Right, guys?

And speaking of Schmidt, how did Dambrot out recruit the master recruiter for Carney? Or is that a bad signing? I’m mean Dambrot can’t judge talent. So, I guess since Schmidt offered Carney, too, that would mean Schmidt can judge talent.

Maybe, just maybe, kids decide for reasons other than the head coach. Maybe Carney didn’t choose Dambrot over Schmidt. Maybe there was more to it. Maybe he just wanted to be closer to home.Who knows? But if there’s more to it than the coach, that would mean many of you are wrong when you blame Dambrot personally every time he is supposedly out recruited. 

And maybe there is more to it when a kid transfers. And maybe the portal and not having to sit just makes it that much easier for the kids and that much harder to coach a kid up. 

Which brings me back to Hima. Syracuse and Boeheim may be a better fit. The 2-3 zone, change of scenery, who knows what else. But they may not be. Either way maybe the  kid will work harder and be more coachable because he realizes he can’t just transfer again without sitting.  This is not say Hima was uncoachable or didn’t work. The point is I don’t know and I would guess not many on here know, either. The coaches are in the gym with theses kids day in day out all year. I’m pretty sure none of you are. But that doesn’t stop a lot of you from posting with such certainty. 

I guess that’s what makes message boards and social media great. You don’t need facts. 


 

grammudder wrote:

Hima isn't/wasn't worth all the NOISE being made by our posters.  His defense was at best atrocious.  Always at least two steps behind.  He couldn't even make dunks in warm-ups.  He had exactly one game where he made multiple shots.  Not exactly a striking resume.  Obviously he was signed originally on the theory you can't teach 6'10".  But the teacher needs good students in the rest of the equation.  Hima failed in that equation.  He should have stuck to  soccer!  This is my opinion and I am sticking to it.  Nonetheless, good luck to him with Jim Boeheim and  his staff.  

While I certainly respect your passion for the Dukes and your right to voice your opinions here, I can't disagree more. He made multiple FGs in five of the last six games of the season. Offense was never and will never be his calling card, but you are drastically underselling it. On a team that desperately needed rebounding, he was top 15 in conference in rebounds per minute. On a per minute basis he outrebounded guys like Tyler Burton, Osun Ossuniyi, and Luka Brajkovic. Even more impressive is his defense. He was 2nd in the entire conference (and I would guess very high nationally) in blocks per minute (and again ahead of Ossuniyi). 

Now he was partly to blame for having to base his stats per minute. He is still raw even on defense, and his overaggressiveness frequently got him in foul trouble. Bottom line is this is a guy that VCU and St. Bonaventure offered out of high school and Texas A&M and Pitt were also interested in. He showed enough in his limited action with the Dukes for the second winningest coach in the history of the game to offer. Despite all that, he only got 12 minutes a game on a team in the midst of a 17 game losing streak with no other healthy player over 6'7".

There was absolutely nothing to play for in the last month of the season other than developing the team for next season. Hima is very raw, but there is definitely talent there. Furthermore, in that last month he was the only Duke who looked like he even wanted to be on the floor. That hunger wasn't rewarded and so we are left looking for a big man once again. Is Hima a surefire star? By no means. He was one of our biggest recruits in sometime though and should have been handled as such. Especially down the stretch he should have been getting plenty of time. What did we have to lose? He should have stuck to soccer? I'll defer to Jim Boeheim over anyone on any message board in judging basketball talent.

I do believe that there is a certain rigidness to KD's thinking which sometimes creates problems that might otherwise be addressed. Not saying KD is not a good coach but  I do see this as a flaw in an otherwise solid coach and individual. Stubbornness is rarely a virtue when flexibility may be in order. Just my 3 cents worth. 

Last edited by El Presidente (5/12/2022 6:52 am)

Could be center by committee. Certain we will see Tre there at times especially if we don't land another big.