Duquesne's Keith Dambrot coaches his players' minds, too, as No. 5 Dayton looms

Maybe it’s merely a function of the time of year.

Or, perhaps Duquesne’s four-, three- and three-point deficits in its most recent defeats make the whistles sound shriller and the voices especially urgent.

Coach Keith Dambrot admitted he was feistier than normal at practice Friday while preparing his team for its toughest stretch of the season. The Dukes (18-7, 8-5 Atlantic 10) visit No. 5 Dayton (24-2, 13-0) on Saturday, followed by the final four regular-season games and the A-10 Tournament from March 11-15.

“They have to know I’m going to fight, too,” he said of his players. “I’m not happy.

“I wasn’t on anybody (at practice), but I care about winning. They have to know, hey, I’m not going to let the grind affect me and I’m a lot older than they are. I’m going to fight every day. I don’t know any other way.”

Dambrot has whittled the rest of the season down to some basic truths.

• Have fun because basketball doesn’t last forever

• If you’re going to shoot a lot of 3-point shots, don’t miss almost 80% of them

“We have five games left, have fun, enjoy every moment you have because those four years are going to be gone before you know it,” Dambrot said. “You can’t let one bad play or one bad shot or one game affect you.”

Dambrot pays attention to his players’ state of mind as much as their physical health. He didn’t study psychology when he was a student at Akron, but his mother taught it as a professor there.

“I can’t say I know a lot about it,” he said, “but I’ve managed people for a long time to kind of know how it works.”

He said he needs to lessen Dayton’s “spurt-ability” that helped the Flyers build a 19-point lead in the second half Jan. 29 before Duquesne spurted back to lose by four. Dambrot’s contention is the team that spurts most often will win, and the spurts are often controlled by the mind.

“Most of ours (are) how we feel about ourselves mentally,” he said. “We’re a little bit up and down emotionally.

“I’m not. I try to be as level as I can. Our guys are a little bit up and down as far as how they feel about themselves from day to day, minute to minute, hour to hour. But I think that’s young people as a whole. We just have to be a little more even, with a lot of energy.”

That roller-coaster feeling might be attributed to Duquesne’s 15-2 start, followed by the current 3-5 rut.

Dambrot noted taking 18 victories into the last two weeks of the regular season is an accomplishment worth noting. But what happens “if you have 18 wins and you think you should have 22 wins?” he said.

The Dukes almost upset Dayton at PPG Paints Arena, which would have put a totally different spin on the season, because they scored 33 points in the final 12 minutes 45 seconds.

If they can’t replicate that scoring pace in front of more than 13,000 people at UD Arena, they must turn to defense.

That’s what VCU did when it held Dayton to its lowest scoring output of the season Tuesday while losing, 66-61.

“If you’re passive defensively, they’re going to beat you up,” Dambrot said. “You have to take it at them, defensively. You have to be super aggressive. (VCU) fought a lot of (entry passes), tried to get them discombobulated. They didn’t make enough shots to win, but they bothered Dayton.

“Now, can you do that on the road without fouling? Do you have enough juice to do it? That becomes the issue. Can you do it for 40 minutes? We know we can play with them. It’s just whether we have a good game or not. Simple as that.”

A big part of the Dukes’ late-season hopes rest on point guard Sincere Carry, who committed four turnovers in the Dayton game. Since then, he is averaging fewer than 2 per game, with 12.4 points and 7.6 assists.

The other key will be the ability to combine good defense with better accuracy from beyond the 3-point line. The Dukes have missed 44 of their past 56 3s in the past two games.

“I can’t get too upset,” Dambrot said. “We just have to shoot the ball in. That’s all.”