There was a lot of snickering and snide comments about Eric Williams on this board when the Dukes were flying high. I don't know what happened to sour things between him and KD, but we could sure use those 14 points, and 7.6 boards a game at his position now. Mike Lewis might be a nice option to have now as well.

phil95 wrote:

Sin was certainly inspiring & showed great leadership trying to will the team back. 

I was so impressed by the early ball movement & big to big passing.

I liked the way Hughes took care of Battle for the middle 25 minutes of the game. He torched Weathers at the beginning & took advantage of an unacceptable error by Marcus at the end.

At this stage of the season, his team has no spark & no juice. They lack the discipline to give maximum effort & think their hardest from the beginning to the end of a game regardless of opponent. They have not played a great 40 minutes once this entire season. For me, that is on the three 4th year juniors & the coaching staff. I will be both thrilled & shocked if they win 3 more games this season including the A-10 Tournament.
 

I agree. I too question if they will win 3 more. Who are they going to beat? Dayton,Bona,VCU all away? G Mason maybe and what now looks like it would be an upset home win against Richmond plus 1 in the tournament??

1111 Vickroy wrote:

And Westender i am sorry to say that I agree with your sentiment

The league is not getting hit hard by graduation this year. We can't advance by the teams ahead of us dropping. We have to get better, and I just don't know if we have the talent to go any higher. KD's strategy was bringing a bunch of MAC level transfers in, as opposed to building from the ground up. The benefit of this is that it allowed us to become competitive very quickly. The downside may be that 5th to 7th place in the A10 may be their ceiling. I guess we'll find out over the next 14 months.
 

I don't think the situation is as bleak as we now express.  Tonight the basketball gods were not with us.  GW puts up a shot, bounces it off the ceiling, and it goes through the hoop.  How do you stop that?  We had a lot of chances around the rim and couldn't get it to fall.  Just a bad night.  It shows how strong this league is now.  Every team has talent.  And next year, these teams will be better.  But, so will we.

I didn't see the players leave the court with a lot of smiles.  They know what it takes to win.  On a night that wasn't theirs, they fought hard in the end and almost pulled it off.  I'll take this team any day over what I had to endure in the Ferry era.
 

Bad bounces? Nope, I think the better team won tonight. We all saw the talent on GW earlier in the season. Young, green, raw, but there. Tonight, they were just better. Took it right to the Dukes and beat them. Looked more athletic and certainly have better shooters. If we see them or UMass in the A10's second round--and there's a good possibility we will--I think we'll be one-and-done once again. And we'll be looking up at both in the standings next year. 

A large part of the problem is the lack of depth.  Rotroff not healthy enough to contribute much, Kelly and F. Hughes out all year, Ellis and the two freshmen not playing (I'm not saying they should be).  I thought Steele would be more of a force up front.  Plus EW leaving.  I think I (we?) underestimated these losses with the 10-0 / 15-2 start vs. mostly weak competition.

If Andre Harris is in fact coming  with the two freshmen, a healthy Kelly, etc., I still think they can move to the top 4 in A 10. Can't recall which ones, but a few of the top teams have some key seniors leaving.

FAM wrote:

Nothing here I’m going to say is smart, enlightening, or interesting.  But it is a lot cheaper than therapy.
-I’m anticipating another fall off per end of the year DAMBROT fashion

It's really looking like a repeat of 2008, 2011, and 2016. I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football.

 

Hard to imagine a more disappointing loss to a sub-par and very inexperienced team.  This season is playing out like the others in recent years when there were promising starts only to collapse in the last third of the season.  The team is still making many of the same mistakes they’ve been making all year.  Even in the first ten minutes when they were outplaying GW, unforced turnovers and bad three-point attempts kept GW in the game when the Dukes should had a commanding lead.
Looking at the big picture, I trace the root cause of this collapse to the inability of the coaches to recruit A-10 quality players to complement the core of the team.  The revolving door caused by failed recruits year after year eventually leads to a team with no reliable depth.  Where is the hope for improvement when, we will rely on the same core next season?  The talent level has to continually rise if Duquesne is ever going to seriously challenge the top four teams in this league.  The initial group of transfers gave the program some credibility once they became eligible, but since then our recruiting contributors have been Sin Carry, EW who is gone, one year of Steele, and Lamar.  To be fair, the knee-injured players may have contributed to the team; but at what level?

duq81 wrote:

levon1975 wrote:

There are very few "easy" wins in the A-10 for any team this season.  Just look at last night as an example, Davidson coming off a huge blowout (29 pts.) over St Bona in Olean, goes into St. Joe's against the winless last place team in the league and gets beaten.  St Louis who was only one game behind the Dukes in the A-10 goes up to UMASS and loses.  So never expect an "easy" game in this league.  GW played the Dukes tough in DC, earlier this year, so I expect nothing but another trip to the Dentist tonight!  Both of those results, by the way, are good for the Dukes.

St. Louis' loss isn't good. It took away a quad one win from us. If we were on the bubble, it might have cost us a bid.
 

Forget the metrics, bubbles, bids, Quad 1 wins.  The team is just not in the conversation any longer.

Of course Dambrot wouldn't disrespect other teams by saying it, but this was a must win. Four of our five toughest games of the entire season are coming up in a five game stretch; and this was the kind of game that tournament teams simply don't lose. We had a sub-.500 team on the ropes in our place and let it get away. We got outhustled, had defensive lapses, and worst of all went away from what was working offensively.

GW has basically nothing to play for at this point of the season, but wanted this one more than we did. It seemed every time there was a loose ball GW came up with it. Then when they smelled blood they started talking trash. Now we have some guys that like to talk, so I'm never surprised to see the opposition giving it back when they're up. They just seemed to want this one more though, and I can't imagine why.

We went to the press for I think the first time all season, and it worked great. It worked in spurts last season and I expected to see more of it this year. I think depth has been a concern, so that has prevented it. This time they were the ones with no depth though. They had three guys go the full 40, and basically stuck with the same five throughout. Had we gone to the press earlier to take advantage, we might have pulled it out. Other than the press, our defense was horrible though. Early on the defensive rotation was great. I don't know if it was a lack of communication between the starters and the bench guys, but after the first 10 minutes or so it was atrocious. Multiple times we left guys completely unguarded. In a three point game, preventing even one of them could have been the difference.

Looking at the play-by-play will tell you what went wrong offensively. We jumped out to an 11-3 lead on five layups and a foul shot on an and-1. The rest of the half 14 of our 24 shots were threes. We composed ourselves at halftime and started the half with three layups and a dunk. Then eight of our next ten shots were either jumpers or threes. By that point an eight point lead had turned into a ten point deficit. The A-10 has some very physical teams, GW isn't one of them. We had the advantage inside if we wanted it. 

The end game was very frustrating to watch. After going three happy again we were scared to take one when we really needed it. GW made a good switch to stop Sin from getting it off, but TDM was open, and Marcus had to take it when he got it. Then if we hadn't taken the timeout when he was shooting the foul shots we would have had one to take after Toro missed. Then we could have gotten the ball at half court and set up a play to get a quick shot instead of relying on a three-quarter court heave.

I'm hesitant to bring this up because it sounds like excuse making, but it isn't. The A-10 has horrible refs. It didn't cost us this game, and it hasn't cost us a game all season, because it has been bad both ways. It seems multiple times a game refs completely miss a call and then go to replay to sort it out. It's not even calling conservatively and using replay as a crutch, like in football when they call a fumble to let the play finish and then go see if it really was a fumble. Multiple times every game it seems the refs completely miss something that happens, then a coach complains, then they go to the monitor to call it. Then on Norman's deep shot, it was announced as a three, but credited as a two. I don't know if it was a two or not, but I was expecting it to be reviewed, but it never was.

GW played one of their better games of the season, and made some circus shots, but we are a better team than them and still should have won this game. We got outcoached, outhustled, and outshot, but still only lost by three. This was a game we needed, and should have won. I am trying to be optimistic for the stretch run, but it's tough after this one.

The Annual February flop is once again upon us.Dukes can’t hit a shot. 2&3 guards do not slash stand around. Problem these kids have lost their legs. If this grind of games with practice especially wears on the younger players no shot with proper form & clearly no Defense. Gee maybe something is out there that rebuilds muscle tissue as well as mass. Maybe the kids lack the appropriate diet to maintain strength & body weight. The problem at Duquesne has always been the February grind. The failure lies Strength & Conditioning not the Coaches. Ronnie & Dambrot could coach. Maybe hire a Endocrinologist from UPMC. NO LEGS NO SCORING & DEFENSE. Pretty simple my friends.

duq81 wrote:

levon1975 wrote:

Hard to imagine a more disappointing loss to a sub-par and very inexperienced team. This season is playing out like the others in recent years when there were promising starts only to collapse in the last third of the season. The team is still making many of the same mistakes they’ve been making all year. Even in the first ten minutes when they were outplaying GW, unforced turnovers and bad three-point attempts kept GW in the game when the Dukes should had a commanding lead.
Looking at the big picture, I trace the root cause of this collapse to the inability of the coaches to recruit A-10 quality players to complement the core of the team. The revolving door caused by failed recruits year after year eventually leads to a team with no reliable depth. Where is the hope for improvement when, we will rely on the same core next season? The talent level has to continually rise if Duquesne is ever going to seriously challenge the top four teams in this league. The initial group of transfers gave the program some credibility once they became eligible, but since then our recruiting contributors have been Sin Carry, EW who is gone, one year of Steele, and Lamar. To be fair, the knee-injured players may have contributed to the team; but at what level?

Agree 100%. Too many recruits have proven not to be A10 level players, which is why they're no longer here. We're at a MAC level with regard to talent. Maybe they'll shock us, and win a couple of these really tough games they have coming up. George Mason, Richmond, St. Louis, and Bona have no seniors in the starting lineup, and many of the other squads only have one. You know VCU, URI, Davidson, and Dayton will still be tough. This league will be a bear next year, and the Dukes won't be able to move up by passing teams that are crushed by graduations. We are really going to need for the recruits to be A10 ready if we plan to make a move next year.

The talent level is certainly there to finish from 5th-9th place on a regular basis. That isn't dreadful in a 14 team league & better than a large majority of the last 30 years.

Hiwever, as several posters have astutely stated previously, 5th-9th ain't the goal.

KD is a very intelligent & competitive fellow. I know he sees that his available arsenal of players can't get the program to the promised land. I will be surprised if a few players aren't shown the door in the offseason in an attempt to upgrade at the 2 and 3 should higher level recruits be available to the program.

All in all, I do think this year's team is better than last year's, last year's team was better than KD's first team, & next year's team sets up to be better than this year's.