Jan. 20, 2012

By Alan Robinson
GoDuquesne.com

Get inside the numbers, and they tell the story - be it good or bad - of a college basketball story, right?

As the 2011-12 Duquesne Dukes are proving, statistics don't always illustrate the complete tale of a season.

A year ago, for example, the Dukes were in the midst of an 11-game winning streak that carried them to first place in the Atlantic 10 Conference and earned them some long-awaited national attention. Their record was very good, and their across-the-board umbers were great.

Bill Clark and Damian Saunders were playing like seniors with something left to prove and to achieve, and a team that shared the ball with great efficiency, turned over opposing teams with regularity and played with a we're-in-this-together mentality was one of the most entertaining in the country to watch. When the season ended, the Dukes led the nation in assists, steals and turnover-to-assists ratio.

These 2011-12 Dukes are flying much further under the radar, with a 12-7 record compared to a 14-5 mark in 2010-11. But despite the loss of most of their inside strength -- two players who are currently playing professionally -- it's somewhat surprising how little these Dukes have changed in a year's time. Inside the A.J. Palumbo Center corridors, the hope is that a team that is putting up numbers similar to those of a season ago will leverage those better-than-anticipated stats into a strong finish.

"We've got to really buy in collectively as a team and execute the two or three things we want to do down the stretch," coach Ron Everhart said. "Where we want the ball, how we want it distributed, who we want to take the shot or make the play at the end of the game will be huge as we move forward."

The Dukes aren't rebounding as well as their 2010-11 version did, but they're shooting free throws better - a trend that, should it continue the rest of the season, might be a major plus during the close games that always seem to occur in the A10.

How competitive is the conference? As of January 18, the Atlantic 10 is the lone conference nationally with 10 of the top 100 teams nationally in RPI. Approximately one-third of the way through the conference schedule, 11 of the 14 teams had either two or three conference victories; only one team, Xavier, had more, and only two, Fordham and Rhode Island, had one or no wins.

These Dukes also are sharing the ball, stealing it with great proficiency and turning it over at a pace that is topped only by national powers Syracuse and Ohio State. Sound familiar?

"I like way the kids are responding ," Everhart said. "They continue to work hard and get better and they're practicing hard every day. We've had some disappointing games, but that hasn't deterred our guys from keeping a good attitude, coming to practice and working hard."

Perhaps this is the greatest surprise of all: Duquesne's top two players offensively, B.J. Monteiro and Sean Johnson, are having better overall seasons as a duo than Clark and Saunders did a season ago.

Monteiro averages 15.5 points (up from 11.4 a season ago) and 5.6 rebounds and is making 50.3 percent of his shots. Johnson averages a team-high 16.2 points and also contributes 3.5 rebounds per game while making nearly 80 percent of his free throws.

For comparison's sake, Clark averaged 16.3 points last season (nearly the same as Johnson is now) and 6.2 rebounds while contributing 47 steals but shot only 46 percent from the floor. Saunders averaged 12.6 points and 7.9 rebounds and had 72 steals, but was only a 52 percent free-throw shooter during Duquesne's 19-13 season.

"The guy who's come along more from a mental standpoint, and understanding what we want and how we play the game, is B.J.," Everhart said. "He's made the sacrifices, he's converted himself from being a volume shooter to being a more efficient playmaker. He's starting to rebound it better and he's starting to be more of an all-purpose guy, as opposed to being a one-trick pony type of player."

Illustrating the year-to-year improvement that is expected of most players but isn't always achieved, stat sheet-filling guard T.J. McConnell is better across the board. He has a higher scoring average (11.9, up from 10.8 in '10-`11), is shooting better (52.4 percent to 49.8) and is a much better free-throw shooter (80.6 percent, up from to 68.3 percent). He already has 118 assists, compared to 140 all last season, and is second nationally in steals per game (2.9).

Also, the Dukes are No. 3 nationally in turnover margin, No. 14 in assists to turnovers ratio and they're shooting 67.5 percent at the free throw line compared to 62.2 percent a year ago.

"The one thing I've always hung my hat on as a coach is that our kids are going to give a great effort," Everhart said. "Hopefully you'll be able to see our kids diving on the floor for loose balls, playing their hearts out at the defensive end of the floor, attempting to try to rebound on every possession and running the floor - the effort parts of the game that hopefully will give us a chance to have success."

Not that all the numbers are outstanding. Rebounding is a concern; the Dukes were the 11th worst team nationally in rebounding margin through 19 games, averaging 31.4 rebounds to their opponents' 38.6.

But if they keep turning teams over at their current pace - they forced UMass into 29 turnovers on while winning 80-69 on Jan. 18 - they might be able to make up for some of their rebounding deficiencies. And even a slightly better free throw percentage the rest of the way would nudge them over the 70 percent mark for the season. That might help them pull out a few of the close games they lost down the stretch last season, when they lost five times by 3 points or fewer (and four times by 2 points or fewer) in their final 11 games.

A modest upgrade in 3-point shooting (they're shooting 32.2 percent from beyond the arc, compared to last season's 36 percent) also might make such a difference.

And tight games almost always set the tone for a season. If the Dukes, for example, had closed out home games against Robert Morris and Saint Joseph's that they led throughout, they would own the same 14-5 record they had a year ago.

What the Dukes need the rest of the season, and beyond:

--- More rebounds, especially on the offensive end, where they have been outrebounded 266-200.

"And our interior defense has got to improve," Everhart said.

--- Better 3-point shooting ; only McConnell (48.1 percent) went into games Jan. 21 at Saint Louis and Jan. 28 at home against La Salle shooting better than 38 percent beyond the arc. Monteiro is shooting 24.4 percent (10 of 41) compared to 34.6 percent (36 of 104) a season ago; Eric Evans, while nearly doubling his scoring average from 4.9 to 9.7, is shooting only 19.6 percent on 3s.

"We've got to be more efficient shooters from the perimeter," Everhart said. "We've made timely shots but we need to get better. We have to be consistent shooters; we can't be hit or miss. Against the better teams, you just don't have that many open looks."

--- Further upgrading at the foul line. The Dukes are much improved from a year ago, when they were the 16th worst team nationally at the stripe, but they still rank in the bottom half nationally.

--- A better closing stretch; they followed that 11-game winning streak last season by dropping eight of their final 11 and seven of their final nine in the conference.

To achieve that, Everhart said, "There are a couple of things I'm looking at."

"The way we handle practice every day; we've got to do more film work, be more positive in terms of showing guys what we want to do -- the good things that we've done, as opposed to harping all the time on cleaning up the stuff that we've done poorly," he said. "I think we've also got to shoot the ball more (in practice), especially from the free-throw line. I thought last year our woes could be attributed to a lot of different things, if you looked at them collectively. But the one common denominator was we were about a 76 percent free throw shooting team throughout that winning streak and the times we slumped, we were about a 64 percent free throw shooting team."

--- A strong close-out in recruiting; the two players already signed for 2011-12, Donovon Jack of Berks Catholic in reading, Pa., and Willie Moore of Aiken High in Cincinnati, are having exceptionally strong senior seasons. Should more scholarships become available, the Dukes need to add at least one proven rebounder and a solid 3-point shooter.