Duquesne is struggling with 3s
Key ingredient for offense is mostly missing
Coach Keith Dambrot has been saying it all season: Duquesne needs to hit 3-pointers to be at its best.
The problem is the Dukes (15-5 overall, 5-3 Atlantic 10 Conference) simply haven’t done enough of that.
After 20 games, Duquesne is shooting 31.7% from beyond the arc, ranking them 10th in the conference and 252nd out of 353 teams in Division I. That is a large enough sample size to say that the Dukes simply might not be a good 3-point shooting team.
“At some point, when you hit game 20 or 25 or 27, it is what it is,” Dambrot said. “You just don’t have good enough shooting. You can say all you want, but if you’re shooting 31.7 or whatever it is, that’s just not good enough shooting.”
While it isn’t discussed much, the Dukes entered the season at a bit of a disadvantage in the shooting department.
Frankie Hughes, who led the team in 3-pointers made last season, suffered a torn meniscus in his knee, had surgery and will not play this season. Eric Williams Jr., who made the second-most 3s in 2018-19, is no longer with the Dukes after transferring to Oregon.
But Duquesne still has competent shooters.
Junior guard Tavian DunnMartin and sophomore guard Sincere Carry are hovering right around 36%, which doesn’t leap off the page at you, but it’s a respectable number. The problem, then, is with the team’s consistency.
Sophomore guard Lamar Norman Jr., who made over 37% of his 3-pointers last season, has dropped to 33.3% this year. Fifth-year senior center Baylee Steele started the season hot but has since fallen to below 30%.
Even Dunn-Martin and Carry likely will admit to having a few too many high-volume, low-percentage games.
The reason any of this matters is because things get tougher for any team when it becomes a one-trick pony.
The Dukes’ strength all season has been inside, where they can feed junior forwards Michael Hughes and Marcus Weathers and let them go to work.
But teams will only let you do that for so long before they start switching over to doubleteams. When that happens, Duquesne, or any team, has to be able to pass the ball back out and hit open shots that might crop up.
Both sides work in tandem, and when one end of it isn’t working, it simply makes things more difficult for the rest of the offense.
“If you don’t shoot the ball from the perimeter, then they can close up gaps,” Dambrot said Friday. “It’s kind of like if you can’t throw the ball in football, it’s hard to run the ball.”
None of this is to say that the Dukes are going to give up hope. After all, shooters shoot, and Duquesne’s shooter are capable of getting hot on any given night from deep.
Take Wednesday, for instance. When the Dukes went on their furious comeback against No. 7-ranked Dayton, Dunn-Martin was drilling 3s.
Hughes even hit a couple from behind the arc, marking his second and third 3-pointers of the entire season.
Additionally, Dambrot cites teams from the past that have caught fire at the right time and had deep, successful postseasons. Just last year, Saint Louis was the 19th-worst 3point shooting team in Division I. They lost four consecutive games in late January and early February to fall to 14-8 for the season and 5-4 in conference.
Then, the Billikens caught fire in March. Guard Tramaine Isabell made 42% of his 3-pointers in the A-10 tournament, and Saint Louis won four consecutive games and landed in the NCAA tournament.
That sort of lightning in a bottle isn’t something to necessarily depend on, but Dambrot brought it up to prove his point that poor shooting teams can still find their rhythm at the right time, even if their sample size doesn’t show much promise.
“We’re good enough,”
Dambrot said. “We got 15 offensive rebounds against Dayton, we played with some juice and some energy, and we got on a roll.
“There’s a lot of teams in this league that are capable of that.”