Kevin Gorman: Duquesne ready to check next box on its bucket list

Duquesne has spent the season checking off items on its bucket list, but there’s one empty box that looms large for coach Keith Dambrot and his Dukes.

Beating Davidson, St. Bonaventure and even VCU this season?

Check. Check. Check. (Even if the last two took a couple of overtimes).

Dambrot has big dreams for Duquesne. He wants to win the Atlantic 10 Conference. He wants to earn a berth to the NCAA Tournament. First things first: What Duquesne hasn’t done under Dambrot is win a game in the Atlantic 10 tournament. Not yet, anyway.

The sixth-seeded Dukes (21-9) have a fantastic chance to change that — and check off another box — when they play No. 14 Fordham (9-22) in the second round at 8:30 p.m. Thursday at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Fordham defeated George Washington, 72-52, in the opening round.

“I’ve had a lot of success in tournaments, but none here so far,” Dambrot said Wednesday of the A-10. “For Duquesne, games in February and March haven’t mattered all that much. We’re trying to make it matter where, eventually, it’s for championships because that’s what’s fun.”

Duquesne lost to Saint Joseph’s last year. In 2018, the Dukes lost to Richmond. The year before that, in Jim Ferry’s final season, Duquesne hosted the event at PPG Paints Arena and lost to Saint Louis, 72-71, in the opening round.

The Dukes haven’t won an A-10 tourney game since they beat Saint Louis in 2015, only to lose to George Washington in the next round. Duquesne hasn’t made a run to the A-10 final since 2009, when Ron Everhart led the Dukes to wins over UMass, Rhode Island and Dayton before losing to Temple.

What’s familiar to Duquesne is foreign to Dambrot. At Akron, he led the Zips to nine Mid-American Conference championship games, including seven consecutive. That they won only three — “not enough” — is what drives him with the Dukes.

It’s not lost on Dambrot that Duquesne needs one win to match the 22-win total of 1961-62 and is two wins shy of recording the most victories in a season since the 1953-54 Dukes won a school-record 26 with Dambrot’s father, Sid, at point guard.

No wonder Duquesne junior forward Marcus Weathers wasn’t willing to accept one win in the A-10 tourney as any major accomplishment, even though these Dukes haven’t won any.

“I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the goal,” Weathers said, with a smile. “It’s always the goal to win. If we can make a little bit of history, that’s always icing on the cake.”

Dambrot knows that the number of wins isn’t as important as the gravity of those games, which might require Duquesne to make history. Its nonconference schedule was soft enough this season that 22 or 23 wins won’t get the Dukes invited to the NCAA Tournament. Maybe not even the NIT.

But an A-10 tourney title? That’s an automatic berth.

“We need to be playing in the championship game every year, like we did at Akron for seven straight years,” Dambrot said. “Then you know you’ve arrived. Now you know you’re good. In this league, I don’t know if anybody can play in the championship game seven straight years. It’s too good of a league.

“We need to win. We need a lot of things. We’ve got to keep checking our bucket list. Eventually, we need to have a winning record against everybody in the league. That’s how you know you have a good team.”

Dambrot believes he has a good team. The Dukes won their first 12 games of the season. They won their first five A-10 games, including a 58-56 overtime win over Fordham on Jan. 15. And they swept the season series, winning at Fordham, 59-54, on Feb. 16.

But Duquesne blew a chance at a top-four seed and double bye with a loss to Richmond in the season finale last Friday at PPG Paints Arena. What Dambrot wants to find out is what the Dukes can do if they can beat Fordham a third time and reach the quarterfinals, where No. 3 seed Rhode Island (21-9) awaits Friday. The Rams handed Duquesne its most lopsided loss of the season, a 77-55 defeat Jan. 22.

“If we can get by the first game, I think we’ll give Rhode Island all they want,” Dambrot said. “No disrespect to Rhode Island, either. They’ve got a lot better history than us. But we’re not going to be scared, I can guarantee you that.”

Until Duquesne can check off the next box on the bucket list by winning an A-10 tourney game, that’s the only guarantee that Dambrot and his Dukes are able to make.

They shouldn’t be scared to make history.

If anything, it should make the Dukes want to win when it matters most.