On a majority of college basketball teams nowadays, the adage fits: “You can’t tell the players without a program.”
It’s particularly true at Duquesne, where six of seven transfers are eligible for Monday night’s season-opening game against Atlantic Sun Conference preseason favorite Lipscomb at 8 p.m. as part of a men’s and women’s doubleheader at UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse.
It will be the head coaching debut for Duquesne’s Dru Joyce III, whose men’s team returns two starters among six veteran players.
“I do believe in our depth,” he said. “We can go as many as 10-11 deep, and that’s important for the style we play.”
The Duquesne women’s team will face Princeton in the opener at 5 p.m.
The NCAA transfer portal has exploded with increased activity since its inception in 2018 as players seek chances for more playing time and often are in pursuit of lucrative name, image and likeness contracts.
Duquesne, coming off a long-awaited return to the NCAA Tournament after winning its second Atlantic 10 Tournament championship, heads into a new season with the question of whether Pittsburgh’s A-10 team can generate another meaningful run without its two leading scorers from a 25-12 team last season.
“Our fan base is excited,” Joyce said, despite the absence of guards Dae Dae Grant (16.4 ppg) and Jimmy Clark III (15.0), both of whom are playing professionally in other countries.
Like the fans, Joyce is keyed up after taking the coaching reins from Keith Dambrot, his high school mentor at Akron (Ohio) St. Vincent-St. Mary. He spent the past two seasons as Dambrot’s associate head coach when the Dukes were a combined 45-25 (.643).
But now come the questions. “What’s the plan?” “Who’s starting?” “Can you win another A-10 championship?”
For Duquesne, picked to finish eighth among 15 teams in the A-10 preseason poll, junior forward David Dixon (7.2 ppg) and sophomore guard Jake DiMichele (6.4 ppg) represent the lone returning starters.
Dixon, for one, took the poll results as a slight to the Dukes.
“I feel like even though we won a championship, we’re still being disrespected,” he said. “That’s putting a fire in our eyes. We won something, and you’re still looking down upon us. That drives us. That motivates us to be even better.”
When reminded of the unfolding scenario, Joyce flashed a smile inside the Joe & Kathy Guyak Player Development Center, the Dukes’ practice facility just down the hall from the UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse arena.
“If it lights a fire, it lights a fire. I’m not going to be the one to put that fire out.”
He knows the details of a once-proud program at Duquesne that, before Dambrot took over in 2017, had been through eight coaches since John Cinicola’s 1977 squad won the A-10’s first tournament championship and last played in an NCAA Tournament.
“It’s just part of the process. I’m glad there’s an interest,” Joyce said. “It could be the opposite way that no one cares, no one has any questions. People want to know what I’m going through. I usually tell them it’s been fun. I’m enjoying it. I like the hard work of it. I like the challenges. I’m embracing them. It’s just a day-by-day process that I’m enjoying.”
Duquesne and Lipscomb, which edged Austin Peay and North Alabama for the top spot in the A-Sun preseason poll, will be squaring off for just the second time.
In the first meeting in November 2019 at La Roche — while UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse was under construction — the Dukes defeated the Bisons, 58-36, holding Lipscomb to its lowest points total since joining Division I in 2004-05.
With Grant, Clark and a host of others gone, Dixon, DiMichele, junior guard Kareem Rozier, junior forwards Chabi Baree and Matus Hronsky and sophomore forward Jakub Necas represent Duquesne’s returning players.
The 6-foot-9 Dixon, the Dukes’ energetic dunking machine, is expected to take on a more meaningful role as the team’s primary shot-blocker this season.
DiMichele, the former Our Lady of the Sacred Heart star, has been hobbled by a foot injury but is expected be ready Monday.
He achieved somewhat of a cult status in his freshman season after breaking into Duquesne’s starting lineup as a walk-on and producing a number of memorable plays before being awarded a scholarship in the offseason.
Charismatic point guard Rozier, the self-proclaimed player-coach with a knack for the camera and microphone, thrives in his role off the bench, though he may be the team’s primary starter at point guard with junior college transfer Brandon Hall likely to be redshirted while recovering from a severe knee injury suffered near the end of last season while at Howard (Texas) College.
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“I’m going on my third year now, my junior season,” said the diminutive Rozier, a 5-9 spark plug who seems capable of embracing any role, even a bench-patrolling towel-waver when he’s not on the floor. “I’ve been very focused on keeping my edge. I definitely do think it’s a higher responsibility of being a leader, especially with a new team.”
The 6-9 Baree and the 6-8 Hronsky — a pair of little-used role players to date — expect to see more action, though Baree has been slowed by a lingering hamstring injury.
The wild card appears to be Necas, the 6-8 native of Czech Republic who broke out late in his freshman season to make a major contribution to Duquesne’s postseason run that included a pair of victories over nationally ranked teams Dayton and BYU.
Who could forget the iconic photo of Necas in Omaha, Neb., standing on a row of chairs, fist raised in front of Duquesne’s fans following the Dukes’ 71-67 NCAA first-round victory over then-No. 21 BYU?
In seven games this summer at the FIBA U20 EuroBasket, Necas finished as the tournament’s top scorer with an average of 18.6 points while shooting 44% (44 for 100), including 38.8 (19 for 49) from 3-point range. He also added averages of 8.4 rebounds and 2.7 assists, registered six blocks and converted 95.8 % (23 for 24) of his free-throw attempts.
Duquesne’s seven newcomers are senior guard Tre Dinkins III (Canisius), junior guards Cam Crawford (Marshall) and Maximus Edwards (George Washington), senior guard/forward Jahsean Corbett (Chicago State), senior forward Alex Williams (Furman), sophomore forward Eli Wilborn (Saint Francis) and junior college transfer guard Brandon Hall.
Dinkins averaged 10.8 points in two seasons at Canisius, scoring in double figures 33 times.
The 6-5 Crawford averaged 8.2 points last season at Marshall, scoring a season-high 20 at home Dec. 6 against Duquesne on 9-for-18 shooting in a reserve role, though the Dukes prevailed 85-72.
Edwards won A-10 Rookie of the Year honors at George Washington in 2022-23 and averaged 11.6 points and 6.6 rebounds per game over two seasons with the Revolutionaries.
The 6-6 Corbett, who scored more than 1,300 career points in three seasons at Chicago State, turned in an impressive performance last season against Duquesne, finishing with 21 points on 10-of-14 shooting to go with 11 rebounds in the Dukes’ 65-60 victory on Jan. 31 at UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse.
“Oh, believe me, he reminds us about it all the time,” Dixon said.
But like Dixon, Joyce is glad to have Corbett on their side this time around.
“You’ve got guys adjusting to new roles, new environments,” Joyce said. “There’s a lot of growth that happens, so I’ve been impressed with the entire group.”
The 6-8 Wilborn was named to the Northeast Conference All-Rookie Team last season after averaging 10.8 points and 7.4 rebounds at Saint Francis.
Meanwhile, the burly 6-5, 235-pound Williams, who spent three seasons at Furman, shooting a combined 44.5 % (198 for 445), hasn’t practiced so far because of a broken bone in his foot, He was expected to remain sidelined for at least the early going of the regular season.
Still, there are plenty of options to choose from, Joyce said.
“We challenge our guys to be tough on the defensive end. But we want to run, we want to play with pace on offense,” he said. “Guys are going to get tired in the midst of that, if they’re playing at a high level, which they should. There’s nothing wrong with being fatigued. You’ve just got to recover.
“We do have the ability to bring the next player in, to bring the next guy in and keep that intensity at a high level, and that’s going to be a key for us.”
Managing a team with so many new people is “quite the challenge, and it’s not solely on me,” Joyce said. “I’m the one who’s trying to connect the dots and bring things together.
“I have a plan. I have tactics to try to bring the group together from an emotional state and an unselfish state. But, really, the process belongs to the players, the commitment belongs to them. It doesn’t happen overnight, but I do think we have an unselfish group that wants to find out how to win, and I respect that.”