By CHUCKIE MAGGIO
Everything LeBron James touches, that doesn’t get traded, turns to gold.
James ranked No. 6 on Forbes Magazine’s 2018 ranking of the world’s highest paid athletes. He signed a lifetime deal with Nike in 2015 that is reportedly worth over a billion dollars. He will play in his 15th NBA All-Star Game a week from Sunday and has appeared in eight consecutive NBA Finals.
While James’s Los Angeles Lakers continue to pursue New Orleans Pelicans star Anthony Davis ahead of Thursday’s trade deadline, James’s high school coach will pursue his first win over the St. Bonaventure Bonnies on Wednesday evening. Keith Dambrot is in his second year as Duquesne head coach.
Dambrot coached James for two years at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, one of the only coaching gigs he could get after being fired from Central Michigan University in 1993 for using a racial slur while attempting to motivate his players.
“LeBron has changed the lives of so many people,” Dambrot said last year when he returned to the St. Vincent-St. Mary gym to coach Duquesne against Radford, and the 60-year-old would know. After coaching two consecutive state championship teams, he was hired by the University of Akron as an assistant. Three years later, he became Akron’s head coach. Thirteen years and 305 wins later, he was named the 17th head coach in Duquesne’s history.
“He is really the first guy that… showed me how to play (the game) at a very high level,” James told Cleveland.com in 2015. “He was a college coach coaching a high school basketball team. He coached it, as I’ve heard, like a college program.”
Jaylen Adams‘s 40-point game at the Palumbo Center last February kickstarted a Duquesne swoon, the first of six straight losses and a 1-8 close to the 2018-19 season. Dambrot’s first Atlantic 10 slate as Dukes coach started with four wins in the first five games. It finished with a 7-11 league record and double-digit loss to Richmond in his first A-10 Tournament game.
Perhaps the Dukes will falter again in February; after all, they did lose 68-64 to Dayton last Saturday to start the month. Injuries have started to mount, as TribLive.com’s Jerry DiPaola reported that just seven healthy players finished Monday’s practice. Freshman guard Sincere Carry was sidelined with a knee injury while guard Tavian Dunn-Martin sat with an ankle ailment, forward Marcus Weathers had a groin issue and guard Lamar Norman Jr. suffered a concussion after running into a wall in practice.
However, the defeat to Dayton was just the second in eight games as Duquesne sits 6-3 in conference, good for fifth in the league. DiPaola wrote that Carry and Weathers are hopeful to play Wednesday. The Dukes are 4-1 at home in A-10 play, starting to fit the description of a group a LeBron-endorsed coach would develop. This isn’t your slightly older brother’s Duquesne team.
While Davidson’s guards arguably hold the highest stock in the league after the three-point show they put on in the Reilly Center last Friday, Duquesne may feature the conference’s best young tandem. Carry averages 12.4 points per game and is tied with Dayton’s Jalen Crutcher for the league’s assist lead with 5.9 a contest. Eric Williams Jr., a 6-foot-6, 205-pound sophomore, leads the team with averages of 12.9 points and eight rebounds.
Carry’s emergence as one of the A-10’s top freshmen was a significant contributor to junior Mike Lewis II opting to transfer after the first semester after a 15 minute-per-game decrease in playing time. Lewis II led the team by averaging 14 points on four made field goals a game in each of his first two years in Pittsburgh, but the Dukes have not felt his absence.
When Dambrot moved to Pittsburgh he brought center Michael Hughes with him from Akron. Hughes’s best game was a 21-point, 14-rebound showing in a win at George Washington on Jan. 20. That was one of two 20-point double-doubles this season; he compiled 20 points and 10 boards in a loss to Pitt in November. The 6-foot-8 Kansas City native has had a stellar season overall, boasting averages of 11.5 points and 6.6 boards a game. He and Osun Osunniyi are first and second on the conference’s block list, separated by just 0.03 swats a night.
They’re no James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, but Williams Jr., Carry and Hughes have become Duquesne’s trusted Big Three. The individual matchups between Carry and Kyle Lofton as well as Hughes and Osunniyi will help decide the game.
As the Bonnies (8-13, 4-4) prepare to play a matchup that will put them over or under .500 in A-10 play with nine regular season games left, they also put their five-game win streak over Duquesne on the line. The streak has been tested each time, as the largest margin of victory was seven.
“Coach Dambrot has done a really good job… those kids play extremely hard,” Bonnies coach Mark Schmidt said after last February’s win at the Reilly Center.
With six A-10 wins, a coach who mentored “King James” himself and the home court advantage, the Dukes will make it difficult for the streak to reach six.
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