Atlantic 10 Basketball: 5 takeaways from start of 2022-23 conference play

For better and for worse, it has been a very interesting season for Atlantic 10 Basketball so far. On one hand, the conference was projected to have ~3 bids in the preseason and is now looking like a bona fide 1-bid league (unless VCU remains red hot), but on the other, the parity has made for some incredibly exciting action on a nightly basis. Every team has now played at least seven games, and none are winless or undefeated.

The landscape of the league is becoming more apparent at the extreme ends of the standings, but the vast middle still has a lot of shaping up to do. These are five A-10 storylines or takeaways that I view as worth noting, but it is certainly not an exhaustive list.

VCU is what Dayton was Supposed to be

Coming into the season, the widely accepted understanding of the A10 hierarchy was that it went Saint Louis and Dayton at the top (in either order) with every other team straining their necks to look up at them (I’m proud to say I always believed it was more of a three-horse race).

Saint Louis is certainly one of the top 2 teams in the conference, and there is enough season left for the same to eventually be said of Dayton — it might even be true by next week with how things have gone so far in this conference — but right now the other team at the top with the Bills is VCU. The Rams have won 11 of their last 12 and currently sit atop the A10 standings at 7-1 in conference play.

The defense (ranked 23rd nationally), as always with Mike Rhoades teams, has been the real driving force behind this scorching hot run, but Ace Baldwin is healthy and playing well with 11.9 points, 6.0 assists and 2.4 steals per game, and there are more than a couple of guys that can fill it up on any given night, the most electric of whom may be Hartford-transfer David Shriver.

The offense had been a real question mark in the non-con slate, when the Rams often failed to crack 70 points, but through 8 games of conference play they rank 3rd in the conference for offensive efficiency. They’ve got a tough 4-game stretch upcoming  — at Davidson, at Saint Louis, vs. Dayton and at Rhode Island — but it almost doesn’t matter at this point. They know they have a good chance to win on any given night in this league. That is something they proved at UD Arena a couple of weeks ago.