Dukes show fight in victory

Send message in A-10 opener with feisty play

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

If nothing else, Duquesne used its first Atlantic 10 Conference game of new coach Keith Dambrot’s tenure to show the rest of the league it won’t be a pushover anymore.

Might even try to push you over.

Senior guard Rene Castro-Caneddy scored 21 points, freshman Eric Williams Jr. had 15 and sophomore Mike Lewis II added 12 as Duquesne beat Dayton for the first time in five tries, 7062, Saturday afternoon at Palumbo Center in Dambrot’s A-10 debut. The Dukes (10-4, 1-0) had lost four in a row and eight of the past 10 against the Flyers, but not this time.

“The guys that were returning from last year, we sat and down and talked, like, ‘We don’t wanna lose anymore,’” Lewis said.

Duquesne previously beat Dayton in 2015 at PPG Paints Arena, but this one was on The Bluff, and what a way to ring in both a new year and what many hope will be a new era of Duquesne basketball under Dambrot. With a new coach of its own in Anthony Grant, Dayton (6-7, 01) is in the midst of its own rebuilding phase, as evidenced by both its record and the absence of Archie Miller on the sideline.

And yet, that doesn’t make Duquesne’s victory any less impressive. Plenty of Flyers fans took up real estate in the Dukes building, as they often do wherever they travel, but after 40 minutes, it was the home fans who had all the cheering to do as their team already matched its win total froma year ago.

Fittingly, the turning point came when the Dukes refusedto back down. Dayton freshman forward Kostas Antetokounmpo, brother of NBA star Giannis, dunked over top of Duquesne center Chas Brown to give the Flyers a 34-33 lead just before halftime. The younger “Greek Freak” gave Brown an earful, an eyeful and a slight chest bump, but Brown would have none of what he called “a whole bunch of hoopla.”

A graduate transfer from Coppin State, Brown gave Antetokounmpo a shove going back up the court and players from both teams ended up jawing near the scorer’s table. Grant even ran ontothe court to pull one of his guys from the fracas, and both sides were separated so the officials could talk it over. They decided to assess a non-contact technical foul on Antetokounmpo for taunting, and a dead-ball contact technical on Brownfor the push.

“I think the one thing it shows is Duquesne’s not gonna get punked anymore. We’re just not gonna get punked,” Dambrot said. “I didn’t particularly care for the play, but by the same token, at least he shows we’re not gonna take anything. We’re not gonna be the [pushover] of the league. We’re gonna build the program and become a championship-quality program.”

Lewis made both technical free throws for the Dukes, while Trey Landers missed both for Dayton. As Landers got ready to inbound the ball after coming up empty, he looked back and smiled at some Duquesne fans razzing him and said, “I got somethin’ for you.”

Instead, all Dayton got was a Matej Svoboda 3-point attempt blocked by Tarin Smith and, on the ensuing possession, a gravity-defying reverse layup by Williams to give the Dukes a 3834 lead at halftime as they took a 13-2 run into the locker room.

Duquesnekept working for more cushion in the second half, but Dayton pulled ahead, 62-61, with 4:46 to go. Brown then answered with a dunk followed by a nifty floater by Williams to give Duquesne the lead back at 64-61, and the Dukespulled away.

Senior guard Darrell Davis led Dayton with 19 points and junior forward Josh Cunningham was a load to handle in the paint with 14 points and 13 rebounds for a double-double. In the end, though, the Dukes made sure a sweet triumph wouldn’t slip away.

Next up for Duquesne is a 7 p.m. tipoff Wednesday night against George Washington (8-6, 1-0) back at home, where Dambrot and company surely could use the same energy there was with the Flyers in town.

“After we [lost to] Pitt and Robert Morris, I didn’t know if we’d ever win a game,” Dambrot said with a grin. “It’s funny how things fluctuate. But we’ve shown we can compete. Now can we win? Can we get better? Can we continue to improve as a basketball team?” seventh-best defensive efficiency numbers in Division I — giving up only 90.1 points per 100 possessions — the Panthers (8-6) were never able to gain any kind of rhythm or sense of traction offensively. They shot just 25 percent from 3-point range, missing 12 of their 16 attempts from deep, and 40.4 percent from the field. For the game, they averaged 0.8 points per possession, including a poor 0.59 in the first half.

Those woes have forced a coach widely recognized as one of the brighter offensive minds in the sport to get unusually introspective.

“I told them after the game I’ve got to figure out something to help them a little more offensively,” Pitt coach Kevin Stallings said. “There are too many possessions where it feels like it’s a trip to the dentist.”

Though Pitt’s non-conference schedule wasn’t without challenges, the Hurricanes (12-1) presented skill sets and players the Panthers largely hadn’t seen.

With two projected firstround NBA draft picks at its disposal — guards Bruce Brown Jr. and Lonnie Walker IV — Miami aimed to craft its already excellent defense for a small opponent largely dependent on 3s. Hurricanes coach Jim Larranaga keeps situational stats, numbers that showed Pitt shoots about 70 percent on uncontested 3s and about 30 percent on contested looks from beyond the arc.

They were, if nothing else, going to make life miserable on the perimeter for a team that already has its fair share of shortcomings. Close-outs became a focal point in pregame preparation for a speedy team and those hopes materialized into reality, as the Panthers rarely let off an outside shot without a hand in their face. It was quite effective. Pitt missed 12 of its first 14 3s.

Pitt knew how athletic the Hurricanes were, particularly after watching hours of them on film. Having to actually contend with them was a different story.

“They would just kind of jump in our lanes,” junior Jared Wilson-Frame said. “They were kind of overplaying our offensive sets. We stopped running offense at the pace we needed to really get our plays off. ... It kind of messed us up for a little second and took us more than the time we should have taken to adjust to it.”

Those shortcomings were most pronounced in a stretch of 8:32 when Pitt went without a made field goal, a period in which Miami turned a one-point deficit into a 13-point lead. From about midway through the first half until there was 13:32 remaining, a span of 14:51, the Panthers didn’t get a made shot from anyone other than freshman forward Shamiel Stevenson.

Much of it was the Hurricanes’ defensive effectiveness, but even that only accounts for so much.

“A lot of times, I can’t explain it,” Larranaga said of his team holding opponents to long scoring droughts.

Stevenson finished with a team-high 16 points, matching the second-highest single-game total of his young career, and four rebounds, also a team high on an afternoon in which his team was bullied on the boards by a larger, much more physical opponent. Wilson-Frame added 13 points and freshman guard Parker Stewart had 12 points, giving him 25 over the team’s past two games (he had 70 in the first 12 games).

On a day in when the Panthers were often sloppy and disjointed — finishing with 19 turnovers and seldom assisting made baskets until the game was out of reach — the gap between Pitt’s seven freshmen and the conference’s elite was clear.

During those shooting droughts, the kind that lose games or turn what would have been close contests into blowouts, the doubt and fragility that can consume some teams has an even greater effect for a group that has never been through it, at least against this caliber of opponent in the games that mean the most. In the Panthers’ first conference game, they showed why the rest of this season may be so trying.

“It’s difficult because we mostly have to rely on team play to score,” Stallings said. “We’re not a team that’s built right now to break a guy off on a dribble and just take a guy one-onone. We’re not built right now to be able to throw it inside and get a bucket or a foul or draw a double team or kick it out. We’ve got some development that has to take place before we get guys to be that way. Sometimes, the offense can get hard for us.”