An Evolving Atlantic 10 and Duquesne’s Place In It

A lot can change quickly in the landscape of college basketball outside the Power Five. Conferences shift, teams rise and fall on a cohort of good players, and the best coaches, no matter how loyal they seem, move to the biggest job. Some teams sustain success, but most ride the roller coaster.

Five years ago when I still had considerable hope for Jim Ferry’s prospects as Duquesne’s head coach, I looked from the bottom up at the rest of the Atlantic 10 and thought about how daunting the climb up this meat grinder of a conference would be. They didn’t appear to have much wiggle room even as conference mainstays Temple and Xavier along with passing daydream Butler departed. It was a peak of a long run for a conference that has had its own shares of up and downs.

As Rick Keith Dambrot takes the reigns, the view from the bottom looks a little less daunting in 2017. Don’t get me wrong it’s still a top notch conference, but it fell below seventh in the conference RPI for the first time since 2010-2011 and for only the second time in the last ten years. All the programs are still here, but some of the more highly regarded coaches like Shaka Smart and Archie Miller are gone. A few schools that haven’t wavered look like they’re heading towards transitional seasons at best and a significant amount of talent left the league with less behind it. Even more looks poised to depart after 2017-18. The pipeline doesn’t look terrible, but it doesn’t look great either. I’m not sure I see the next Jack Gibbs or Jaylen Adams in waiting.

For me there, there are four phases that a basketball program can be in: building, reload, transition, and rebuild. Building programs have all the important pieces in place from a previous year’s team and look to make significant gains over the previous season. Reloads are teams that had significant contributors leave but have pieces in place to replace them to do about the same or improve slightly. Transition years are for teams that lost significant contributors, have the replacements in place, but those replacements are a year or so from really taking the over. Often these teams do worse. Finally, there are teams in rebuilds which have significant holes and no way to fix them. I’ll look at each team in the league, explain what phase they’re in now and give a best guess three year outlook, as difficult as that can be with the churn of today’s NCAA. Here I’ll lean negative, positive or about the same.

Davidson

It’s difficult to replace the conference’s leading scorer and one of the true stars of the league in Gibbs, but Davidson has two advantages heading into the ’17-18 season. One, Peyton Aldridge is also a star. Two, the underachievement of the ’16-17 team set the bar nice and low. Gibbs won’t be replaced by a single player but rather the collective effort of the entire team. Oskar Michelson has a lot of room to rebound and fellow Scandinavian Jon Axel Gudmundsson has a nice freshman campaign to build on. The Wildcats also add the highly regarded Kellan Grady and I would expect the newcomer to play major minutes.

Davidson have two issues longer term however. First, they have six scholarships tied up in their senior class including Aldridge. Second, Bob McKillop’s not getting any younger. I have the Wildcats reloading next year, but it’s difficult to see anything but a transition year heading into the 2018-19 season. At the moment, McKillop is the program and I think they’ll find a suitable replacement when the time comes, but any time you replace a coach of his importance, you have to be a little worried.

Dayton

What are the two best ways to generate traffic as an A-10 blogger?

1. Say something good about VCU.
2. Say something critical of Dayton or St. Bonaventure.

Dayton have a two-fold battle to face. They need to transition from a coach some consider elite in Archie Miller to a guy who enjoyed success in the Colonial, but who ultimately was fired despite some success in the SEC. Keep in mind, the Atlantic 10 was better than the SEC in two of the seasons Grant coached at Alabama as well. I could see Grant making sense for a team like Duquesne or UMass, but the more time I spend thinking about it, the signing was a real surprise for the Flyers. In the end, I think Dayton had the resources to do better, even though I think he’ll prove to be a decent at worst A-10 coach.

Dayton lost some very good players, but I do think people are missing who’s returning as well who may not have gotten a chance. Maybe I’m blinded by his great performance against Duquesne, but Xeryius Williams looks like a really valuable A-10 player in the making. Sam Miller and Ryan Mikesell are no slouches either and a healthy John Cunningham could serve a boost. I think the Flyers are going to go through a transition year between the coaching change and losing 4 of their 5 top scorers, but I think that there is enough there to avoid a complete rebuild at least for now. Longer term, I skew a little more negative however.

Duquesne

This piece went a little long so we’re going to break her into a two parter. Look forward to the second one tomorrow where I’ll summarize my thoughts on the state of the league and explain how Duquesne looks compared to everyone else.

Fordham

I was a rare voice of support for Tom Pecora leading up to his getting fired. I thought he had the pieces in place to finally turn the corner at least a little in the Bronx with the dynamic Eric Paschall, now of Villanova, and handful of other solid complementary players in place. Jeff Neubauer took over and hasn’t done half bad, but he hasn’t done nearly as much as Pecora would have with his roster still fully in place. With Christian Sengfelder and Antoine Anderson transferring, pretty much all of Pecora’s legacy has been set adrift and what remains is all Neubauer. Frankly, there isn’t a lot to like past Joseph Chartouny.

One thing is for sure, this team will play good defense, and leverage turnovers into easy transition baskets. However, I don’t see the makings of much of a half court offense. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I don’t have a clue how to assemble a starting lineup out of the returning players. Along with losing your three leading scorers spells rebuild to me and with no incoming freshman in 2017, I have to lean negative here as well.

George Mason

I like George Mason. I like Dave Paulsen and I like the crew he’s assembled to lead his program moving forward. However, I don’t like their prospects to easily build on their successes from last year.

For Duquesne fans, this year’s Patriots remind me a bit of the ’09-10 Dukes. Coming off a highly successful year where a spark plug of a senior guard and a couple of talented sophomores lead the team to a 20 win season, expectations for a repeat were high. Of course, they couldn’t manage the loss of Aaron Jackson and the team ended up have a transitional year. Marquise Moore was a similar player and that’s not to mention the loss of Jalen Jenkins compounding matters. I expect Mason to take a quick pause, but I also think it will be a brief stop on the way to a building year where they should match or surpass their success from last year. I think future is bright in Fairfax, though I am concerned by the lack of size on the current roster. That said, I think they have the players and a coach in place to at worst be consistently decent.

George Washington

It’s always a great story when an assistant coach hired as an interim coach by a program under duress comes in and keeps the ship from sinking. It’s not often that those coaches make the best long term solution. Maurice Joseph has his work truly cut out for him. Roster turnover hasn’t stopped since Mike Lonergan was fired for being verbally abusive to players. Right now he has a roster of Yuta Wantanabe and a bunch of wildcards. Wantanabe will win some games by himself, but this program is headed for a complete rebuild. I really don’t see a scenario where they compete within the next few years either. If Joseph doesn’t get the job done, I could see the process taking even longer. This could be a rough few years in Foggy Bottom.

La Salle

If Dr. John Giannini were a painter in the same style as he composes his roster, he’d be Jackson Pollock. He slings a little paint here and drizzles a little there but in the end, he has something that works. Sure, people think they can do it themselves, but they can’t.

The Explorers lost Jordan Price who alternated between black hole and game changer during his time in the A-10. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think they are still building with Pookie Powell and BJ Johnson providing the core to next year’s team. Like Davidson, they have the benefit of underachievement on their side and it won’t take much to get better. I see them as a transition at the worst.

Long term, I’m a little more concerned. Giannini seems at his best when he’s building his squad though unconventional means and he’d rank among the most successful coaches like Fred Hoiberg and Tim Cluess at exploiting the transfer market in my opinion. However, Giannini only has Traci Carter waiting in the wings and while he’s a nice get, I always feel best about this program when the list of players redshirting is longer.

UMass

Matt McCall has done some nice things at UMass so far. He’s retained most of the key, young returning players like Rashaan Holloway and Luwane Pipkins and he brought in some solid transfers to replace the ones he didn’t. He’s also offered the entire class of 2018 according to verbal commits (actually the school has 49 active offers). He’s been a busy man and I think he’s managed to avoid a total rebuild.

However, the Minutemen are still heading towards a transitional year as they wait for the transfers to come in and for the young players to get old. I’m not entirely sold on McCall due to his short head coaching tenure, but he inherited quite a bit of talent from Derek Kellogg. That combined with his early efforts and they should be vacating national championships again anytime now.

Rhode Island

The final group of recruits produced by the Danny Hurley love fest are heading into their senior season and it’s hard for me to know what’s waiting in the wings. The college basketball astronomers have put aside their telescopes as the Rams recruiting classes went from a mix of 3 and 4 star players to more normal 2 and 3 stars more typical of the A-10. This year’s team should still be pretty good thanks to a guard heavy lineup. If Hurley can find two guys to defend and keep defenses honest, I don’t think they’ll miss a beat.

Beyond this year is confusing. Will they fall back into recruiting the perceived elite now that Hurley has immediate playing time in his recruitment tool box again? It could be enough to force a transitional year or even reload. If efficiency numbers mean and anything and to me they do, I lean towards the later. Jeff Dowtin, Nicola Akele and Cyril Langevine all quietly performed well in complementary roles. That’s a good sign that they’ll be able to develop into bigger roles later. I do think 2018-19 could be a little rough, but beyond that, I have a lot of confidence that the Rams will consistently compete for the conference title and make regular NCAA appearances with or without star laden teams.

Richmond

It’s hard for me to ever count on the Spiders to be bad, but it’s hard for me to ever expect them to be really good again either. I like Chris Mooney and I think he’s an excellent coach of an outmoded style of basketball few young people want to or have developed the skill set to play. He finds players out of nowhere that develop into solid fits in his system. The problem is, he hasn’t recruited an NCAA tournament caliber core in almost ten years. Winning 20 games in two of the last three seasons wouldn’t be an issue for most A-10 coaches, but when you get paid more than everybody else as Mooney does the expectations change.

Richmond loses a lot of talent and I expect them to take a step back. However, I expect Mooney to be able to manage how far that step back is. They do have the makings of another decent young back court surrounding A-10 Freshman of the Year De’Monte Buckingham, but is there enough to get this team over the hump? It’s difficult to say they’ll be more than a transition team, but there is at least something to attach hope to longer term. The question is whether or not there is enough especially in the post.

St Joe’s

Two teams at the bottom of the conference seem likely to take huge strides forward in 2017-18. No Duquesne fans, the Dukes aren’t one of them but the Hawks are. When I look at this roster it’s puzzling how they didn’t do better. When I look at the efficiency numbers, I guess the results all make more sense. Still, there is something to build on and the Hawks have a number of quality young players like Charlie Brown and Lamar Kimble with multiple years remaining who could probably once again bring Phil Martelli to the bubble.

Martelli doesn’t reload. He dances, rebuilds, builds and dances again. This year his team will build and this group will dance and then they’ll all graduate and the next group will start the process over again. The sun rises in the east and Martelli goes all in. Some things are just a given.

Saint Louis

The other team I expect to build rapidly is Saint Louis. Travis Ford came in his first year with the Billikens and flat out punted the year electing to recruit a transfer laden class with only 9 eligible scholarship players. The result will be a team with the talent to complete night in and night out in the A-10 after they gel and shake off the rust.

Ford is riding high and it reminds me a little of when Hurley got hired. The question I have is will his star power translate into more early success than Hurley. My guess is yes, but in the end it remains to be seen but I think they’ll be back towards the top of the league pretty quickly.

St. Bonaventure

The Bonnies seem like the feel good pick to win the Atlantic 10 next year and their backcourt combo of Jaylen Adams and Matt Mobley will serve as preseason pick for best backcourt. On paper, I have serious concerns about the loss of Denzel Gregg, but Mark Schmidt should have enough role players from last year to cobble together a good enough front court defense and rebounding that allows the guards to go crazy and the team to succeed. I don’t know if I see the Bonnies as the favorites, but everybody has some glaring question marks in the league this season. SBU have as good a chance anyone to provide adequate answers and Idris Taqqee could be the glue that holds the entire thing together as they build. He’ll be a key role player and is a proven rebounder from the guard position.

I keep waiting for someone else to hire Schmidt and I’m beginning to wonder if he’ll just be a lifer. I could see why he’d be happy there. He’s making a good buck at a school with a reliable fan base. There isn’t a ton of pressure provided the team regularly competes, plays hard and makes the occasional NCAA appearance. What blows me away is how rarely his name even comes up. For me, he’s done an excellent job with a tough job and I expect the Bonnies to stay tough as long as he’s at the helm. If a Duquesne fan can’t appreciate that, I don’t know who can.

VCU

Over the years, I’ve often asked whether or not this would be the year “X” conference power would falter and need to rebuild. More often than not, “X” was Xavier and they would simply reload with players I hadn’t even thought much of. I’m not sure if this year’s VCU team can avoid at least a transitional year. They have a couple of experienced seniors in Justin Tillman and Jonathan Williams, but only two other returning players averaged for than 10 minutes a game last year. Grad transfer Khris Lane should help stem the issues, but their class of freshman are going to be expected to contribute early.

Even if the Rams struggle early under Mike Rhoades, it won’t be because they’re learning a new system, the luxury of having to the Shaka Smart coaching tree available to hire replacements that plug right into the players and system already in place. They may have a gap to bridge, however, with a transition year, but they’ll be back on their feet before long.