The extra sauce he put on the slam drew his second technical of the night, but afterwards the 6-foot-5 senior was unapologetic.
He hadn’t forgotten the 31-point drubbing the Billikens put on the Flyers 25 days earlier in Saint Louis, and he played this game at UD Arena with a give-no-quarter attitude from start to finish.
Before he returned to the Flyers’ dressing quarters after the 77-62 victory in a game that was not that close, Derkack talked about that fast break slam with 14.1 seconds left, a play that drew a little jawing from Billikens players at midcourt:
“I thought about what they did to us a couple of weeks ago and I was like, ‘Exactly what they did to us, I want to do to them.’
“My thought process was: ‘I’m going to try to break the rim! Just rip it off the backboard.’”
He grinned and shrugged: “That didn’t happen…But it almost did.”
He did play a big part of bringing down the Billikens in stunning fashion.
Saint Louis came into the game 25-2 and leading the Atlantic 10 with a 13-1 record. Their romp over the Flyers on January 30th was the worst loss Dayton coach Anthony Grant had suffered in the nine years he’s been back here leading his alma mater.
That defeat was part of an unsettling grounding of once high-flying Flyers, who lost five of six games in a 16-day span from mid-January into early February.
Although the team recently had righted the ship and came into Tuesday winners of three games in seven days, no one foresaw this kind of Billiken beatdown.
The Flyers were up 40-15 with 3:42 left in the first half. They led for over 38 minutes of the game. Saint Louis had just one lead all night — 4-3 — and that lasted all of 17 seconds.
Dayton — now 19-9 and 10-5 in A-10 play — didn’t just outplay, outhustle and outsmart its longtime rival.
The Flyers bullied the Billikens.
And the guy who triggered much of that was Derkack, who came in off the bench early in the first half and made his presence known from then on.
A transfer who started his career at Merrimack and then never quite got his due in a season at Rutgers, he came to Dayton this year and brought along a chip on his shoulder and grit in his gut.
“I think I bring a sense of toughness to a game,” he said. “I think you have to have that.
“For us, I think we had some moments this year where we came into a game a little soft, like we were just trying to figure out what was going on.
“But there were other games — like when we played Florida State at home — that we played with a vengeance.
“We even had some of that against Cincinnati, but we shot the ball badly that game. If we’d have shot better, we’d have been in that one.
“I think it’s human nature to step up in big games and I think it’s my job, as an older guy, to see that our younger guys know that, too. I think I kind of have an obligation to show them, ‘Look, we’re not scared of anybody.’
“And even if it takes a small tech to ignite the crowd, it shows our young guys, ‘You can fight just like me.’”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
While Grant may not have cared for the hang-on-the-rim technical, he didn’t mention it at his postgame press conference. He stressed the positive effect of Derkack’s storm into the fray way of play:
“There’s a contagious energy. He kind of brings that multiplying effect. Some of what he brings onto the court doesn’t show up on the stat sheet, but he’s certainly one of those guys where the other guys feed off his energy.”
Amaël L’Etang, the Flyers’ 7-foot-1 sophomore, had his best game ever as a Flyer.
He finished with a career-best 26 points, 10 rebounds, three blocked shots and three assists, including a behind-the-back wraparound feed to Derkack who scored the fast break lay-up and called the pass “a very French thing to do.”
While Derkack made praiseworthy but teasing reference to L’Etang’s Gallic style, the towering Frenchman from Toulouse noted the New Jersey guard’s blue collar approach:
“He’s a leader. He leads the way he plays. He’s tough. He’s not afraid of contact. I appreciate that.”
‘A long time’
Derkack would finish with 14 points, five rebounds and a steal, but the thing you’ll likely remember most about him Tuesday night was the way he not only helped steel his teammates’ backbones, but how he got under the Billikens’ skin.
You saw that at various times in the game and especially when L’Etang blocked a shot by Saint Louis guard Trey Green.
Derkack ended up with the ball and headed in the opposite direction for a fast break lay-up. As he went up for the shot, he was swatted by the Billikens’ Quentin Jones and sent tumbling.
After a review, referees charged Jones with an excessive F-1 foul.
Derkack went to the line and made two free throws. The Flyers got the ball after that and Derkack promptly scored on a lay-up too.
He gave UD four points in eight seconds.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Jones was brought to the Saint Louis bench.
Afterward, Derkack said that’s kind of how it’s always been with him, though he admitted Saint Louis really brought it out of him.
The first technical came with 9:48 left in the first half.
Credit: David Jablonski
Saint Louis’s Ishan Sharma had been fouled under the basket by UD’s Jaiun Simon. Derkack felt the Billikens’ forward kept trying to muscle forward after play had been stopped and stepped in to halt any more maneuvering.
“It was just a miscommunication,” Derkack said. “It was just basketball.”
Then again it seemed to affect Sharma more than that. Like Derkack, he too was whistled for a technical, but he did nothing the rest of the game, finishing with two turnovers and no points.
Meanwhile, the Flyers — with Derkack hitting his second three-pointer of the night — were off on a 22-9 run that led to the 25-point margin.
That got the crowd into it and L’Etang admitted at one point, he stopped and listened and said: “Whoa!”
He said it had been “a long time” since he heard the Arena crowd that loud that early in the game:
“It felt like we were playing with six players.”
‘We did what we wanted’
In an Arena hallway after the game, Derkack was embraced by Eric Spina, who thanked him for the toughness he had shown.
After the UD president had gone, Derkack made it a point to praise Grant again, just as he had in the postgame press conference.
More than just saluting how the coach’s game plan had worked, he seemed to be making a point to Grant’s detractors who had become more vocal when the team floundered in that five-game swoon:
“A.G., Coach Grant always talks about…he says he’s been here before. He’s seen it before. He’s seen everything. He’s been around. We just really need to trust him and when we do the results kind of show.
“We had a little rough patch in the middle of the season, but I think we’re starting to get a big groove here.
“And he is the reason why this is happening.
“We’re hitting our stride at the right time. This was a great team we played tonight …They’ll probably be the A-10 champs and we kind of handled them. We showed tonight that we can take care of anybody.
“Tonight, we did what we wanted.”
Well, almost.
The rim is still up there.
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