By Steve DiMiceli
The Dukes look to clinch their 5 straight winning season for the third consecutive game when they travel to George Washington for a Saturday afternoon match up. The Dukes look to have a serious up hill battle to get home court for the A-10 tournament and the NIT is a pipe dream. They would need to rattle off 5 or 6 straight for that to happen. Unless they somehow get an extreme dose of maturity, that's not going to happen.
GW makes for a tough match up on paper. The Colonials get a ton of offensive rebounds. Of course, they miss a ton of shots which skews that number upwards. They're also a fairly disciplined team in the turnover department so the Dukes are probably going to need their best rebounding effort in a month to get stops.The Colonials are one of the more disappointing teams in the league this year. I had them 5th coming into the season with Tony Taylor as a potential POY candidate. Taylor's numbers regressed in every department except steals. His back court mate Lasan Kromah who has returned from a redshirt year to be the teams second leading scorer. They are the only players to average double digits scoring. Forward David Pellom has hurt the Dukes in the past and Dwayne Smith has been coming on at the end of the season.
The Dukes will get their fair share of open looks today and they are due for a good shooting day. GW does not defend particularly well. The Dukes need to be patient and wait for the right shot. It'll come. They will also want to keep the ball around the perimeter on D. I doubt it will happen but I'd like to see BJ Montiero and Andre Marhold on the floor with Kadeem Panthophlet. Montiero and Panthophlet have been in my opinion the two strongest defensive rebounders over 6'3.'' Sadly, TJ has probably been the strongest overall.
The writing on the wall is getting pretty clear for the 2011-2012 season. While they managed to give us some hope for the first half of the A-10 schedule, they proved it to be just a rebuilding year with a very difficult schedule as we suspected it would be. A win today wraps up an easy CBI invitation and top 100 regular season RPI. Also at stake today is good will for the fans and hope that maybe this young team won't completely fold down the stretch every year. They haven't lost more than two in row this year. Let's hope that trend continues.
