A-10 Basketball: 7 positives and negatives from first month of 2021-22 season

Turning Q4 Losses Into Q1 Wins

A pre-Thanksgiving draft of this column had Dayton squarely in the negative group, putting a flamethrower to the Flyers for low-IQ defense, lazy rebounding, and completely bizarre rotations (10 players played between 13-26 minutes vs Austin Peay).  The Flyers showed their talent at points in their three sub-200 home losses (especially Malachi Smith on offense and DaRon Holmes II on defense) but my hope was that they could clean up their mistakes and let the talent shine through in time for conference play.  It took five days.

Dayton won the ESPN Events Invitational with wins over Miami (Fl), #4 Kansas, and Belmont, and seemed like an entirely different team.  Dayton held Kansas to 28 2nd-half points and was constantly praised by Dick Vitale for their hustle and heart, they had 17 assists in a low-scoring game vs Belmont and shot 42.6% from three across the weekend.  Malachi Smith put up a triple nickel in every game, DaRon Holmes II shot 16-22 and added in 10 blocks, and every rotation player had at least one crucial half of contributions.

If Dayton carries this weekend’s turnaround into the rest of the season and finish top 4 in the A-10, then whatever happened in practice this week will become the stuff of legend. David Jablonski’s oral history of those days will be a bestseller and Anthony Grant will have to quit coaching to go on a motivational speaking world tour.  Last week, it would have been an understatement to call the Flyers a disgrace at the little things.  Now, an NCAA Tournament appearance looks entirely possible.

Kings Of The Takeaway

The A-10 DPOY race is already electric and it’s going to require an excellent highlight reel to take this year’s award.  Six players (Mitchell, Osunniyi, Holmes, Moore, Ward, Okoro) are in the Top 36 nationally in block %.  I wish I could put some of these swats into words, but it’s only proper to simply roll the tape.

Makhel Mitchell leads the A-10 in blocks with 3.6 per game, fueling Rhode Island to 3rd in the nation in swats, and his brother Makhi has gotten in on the fun in his return from injury:

Hason Ward might truly believe he can touch the ceiling (43:35), while also being artful (53:10):

Don’t forget that Osun Osunniyi is the reigning DPOY:

Tre Williams may be undersized, but he can still protect the rim:

In the steals department, Jacob Gilyard leads the country with 3.86 per game.  He’s at 384 for his career, one back of the NCAA record. And for those who want to put an asterisk on the record because Gilyard came back for a fifth year, he lost 8-10 games of his senior year because it was shortened by Covid and he will almost certainly break the record in game #8 of this season.