Inside the Dukes: Duquesne Becoming More than Defensive Squad

NEW YORK — The 2023-24 version Duquesne Dukes have certainly built a basketball brand as they stormed back from an early-season struggle to earn the sixth seed in the 2024 Atlantic-10 tournament.

The Dukes, long a team with a focus on interior play under head coach Keith Dambrot, have built their team on defense-first play of guards Jimmy Clark III and Dae Dae Grant.

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Duquesne entered the A-10 tourney ranked as the third-best defense in the league, according to defensive efficiency, behind only co-champs Richmond and Loyola. But the Dukes were second-last to in offensive efficiency, with only 20-loss Fordham scoring at a better rate.

So when Duquesne’s second-round A-10 game against Saint Louis on Wednesday turned  into a high-scoring affair in the first half, that had head coach Keith Dambrot uneasy.

“I was a little nervous at halftime, because the score was so high,” he said. “Typically, that’s not good for us. That’s what we kind of dealt with at half time, we had to get back to trying to play our style and get away from playing their style.”

The Dukes didn’t, though. They kept playing defense, but they kept on scoring. Clark scored 20 points for the second straight game — the first time he’d done that all season — and Duquesne got out in transition to capitalize on 12 Billikens turnovers. Duquesne won, 83-73.

The defense is part of the team’s identity — Dambrot called Clark the “Pittsburgh stealer” — but the run-and-gun offense, well, that’s not really what they do best. But if Duquesne wants to keep playing this season, it’s a lesson they needed to learn.

Duquesne lost five straight games to start A-10 play back in January. Since then, they’re 12-3, making the Dukes one of the hottest teams in the conference. But just four times in that stretch did they score 70 points.

In grind-it-out road wins at George Mason and VCU in March, Duquesne pulled off upsets thanks to their defense — and little else. They beat VCU 69-59 and scored only 59 themselves in the win over George Mason. It wasn’t a defense-first effort. It was a defense-only effort.

In Duquesne’s three losses since January, their opponents scored 72, 75 and 79 points. One of those losses came to upcoming quarterfinal opponent Dayton on Feb. 13. The Dukes had the Flyers in their sights until the last six minutes of the game, when the Dayton offense took over and Duquesne couldn’t keep up. 

DaRon Holmes II, the co-A-10 player of the year, scored 24 points. No one on Duquesne scored more than Clark’s 14. Stars will shine, and they can’t always be defeated with superior defense. Sometimes, some one needs to step up.

“The best teams in the country can play defense and offense,” Dambrot said. “Again, we’ve made some good adjustments to try to find the right niche for our team. I’ve been an inside-out coach most of my career, but we’re definitely not an inside-out team. We’re an outside-in team. We’ve had to find the right things for them. 

“I think (assistant coaches Rick McFadden and Dru Joyce III) have done a really good job of that. They’ve done a really good job of stealing other people’s sets and just getting them in the right spots.”

That’s not a revelation that struck Dambrot on Wednesday. He said they’ve been working on that improvement through the second half of the season. Now, with Clark scoring 20 points in two straight and three of the last five, they might be finding that player, later in the season and his career,.

“I feel like, even though the numbers haven’t indicated it, we’ve played better offense over the last 10 games,” Dambrot said.

The Dukes are on the NIT bubble entering play on Thursday. If the want to keep playing, they’ll likely need to continue their offensive surge.