Spencer Thomas | editor-in-chief

Complacency is the death of progress, but The Dukes’ performance on Tuesday versus Dayton wasn’t the worst possible outcome. They were able to climb back within 20 against a team that has two top-10 wins this season. That’s not any uglier than close losses to Maine or Saint Peter’s.

Captain Kareem Rozier said after the game that he saw signs of the team that started 0-6, which is a good-news, bad-news sort of thing. On one hand, they showed that their progress isn’t linear. However, mistakes that they made weren’t anything incurable, or baked into the structure of the team. That can be seen when splitting the season in two. On Dec. 11, Duquesne was 2-8. Since then, it’s gone 7-2. With plenty of sample size, Duquesne has shown to be below average offensively, and the turning point hinges on the defensive end, where Duquesne went from giving up 69.4 points per game to 62.5.

“All the offensive outputs that we’ve had, they’ve been great…” said Head Coach Dru Joyce III. “[But] If you take a look at how we’ve been defensively, there’s a lot of consistency throughout the wins that we’ve had.”

When Duquesne posts a defensive rating under 101, which is slightly above average for mid-major teams, they are 8-2. Those two losses were their worst of the season, to Maine and Hampton — two of its worst games by nearly every offensive metric. If they can play less-than-terrible offense, the Dukes can be in the top end of the Atlantic 10 Conference.

The offense hinges on the performance of two transfer guards, Maximus Edwards and Jashean Corbett. Both scored over 12 points per game last year but have seen their outputs drop in a new setting. When the offense looks sluggish, they can take over possessions and keep the game competitive. They’ve done that more lately, but Duquesne is at its best when one of those newcomers is scoring consistently. There, the team begins to look more like last season’s Dukes, who thrived on stout defense, and heroic guard play by Dae Dae Grant or Jimmy Clark III. Nobody on this year’s team has proven to be in the same stratosphere as Clark or Grant, and that could very well be this team’s kryptonite. If somebody can, however, it will be Edwards or Corbett.

As for the offense, its key to success seems to be in the ball movement. There was a tangible difference between their struggles in the Dayton game and when they were racking up ugly losses to bottom-tier teams in November. Movement and passing improved dramatically, even if it didn’t end in points.

It was a continuation of how the dynamics of the offense improved with the team. The Dukes are averaging more than two fewer turnovers per game since Dec. 11, but their assist average has skyrocketed from 11.9 to 17.2. That is to be expected, as the incoming transfers build chemistry, and it was even something that Joyce stressed before the season started.

This team needs to pass the ball. It creates better looks for guys like Edwards who were supposed to come in to shoot and score. Their 3-point shots are going in at a higher clip, and so they’re hitting 2.7 more per game. That’s between 6 and 9 extra points each game, which is enough to have won them those games versus Maine and Hampton. Now that the games really start to count, that is clicking too.

Some of it also is shooters reverting upward to the mean. That is best demonstrated with Edwards. He started the season on a brutal cold streak that cost him his starting role and tanked his confidence. Since then, he’s found his touch, with a pair of outstanding performances against George Washington and St. Bonaventure that made him the first Duke to win conference player of the week since 2021. He won’t always be that good, but there is a happy medium that time will surely see him average out to.

Despite Tuesday night, the Dukes are on an upward trajectory. When they travel to Fordham on Sunday, they can prove the Flyers’ butt-kicking was an aberration, not a regression.

“We can’t revert back to that,” Rozier said. “I’m gonna do my best to not allow that to happen.”