He started his career as a grad assistant at Miami and then spent several years on Charlie Coles’ staff.
“I knew what a tough environment this would be,” he said. “For any road team, this is a difficult place to win.”
Coming into Wednesday night’s NIT quarterfinals match-up with the Dayton Flyers on their home court, Pedon also knew plenty about the current UD team, too:
“They’ve played tremendous since February 1st. They were 11-3 and had lost to just one team: VCU. In mid-majors or mid-major plus basketball, there were very few teams nationally that were better than them.”
And that’s why, before the team’s pregame meal Wednesday — as he was taking his players through one final film session tutorial — Pedon suddenly had an assistant put the film on hold and said he then looked straight at his team:
“I said, ‘Look…at…me!’
“I made them all look at me. I said, ‘You all are going to have to have composure tonight. There are going to be moments when you want to hang your head. (When) you want to get mad at yourself. You want to veer off.
“’When you come in here you cannot splinter.’”
He said he challenged his team to be the ”closet knit group” that they could be:
“A lot of what we talked about was not X’s and Os. In this setting, I think a lot of the other stuff, especially this time of year, can be more important than anything.
“You want to coach their heart this time of year.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Coming into this game, Dayton Flyers coach Anthony Grant looked into his team’s eyes and saw:
Trouble.
Grant said he could tell his team didn’t have the “mental focus” it needed:
“When you deal with young people you get a feel for it.”
Over the last few days he said he and his staff had stressed to the players where they needed to be at this stage and “they just didn’t get there.”
Senior guard Jordan Derkack echoed that sentiment: “I feel like we didn’t come with the right mindset these last two days.”
The Flyers hadn’t had that problem when they went on the road for their first two NIT games, beating Bradley nine days ago by 14 and then thumping UNC Wilmington by 19 last Saturday.
“When you go on the road you have more fire,” Derkack said. “These past couple days, when we figured we were at home, I feel like we kind of coasted in practice a little bit. I think there was a little coasting going on.
“And it kind of bit us in the butt early.”
There was no “kind of” to it.
Just four minutes and 20 seconds after the opening tip, the Flyers already were “butt-less.”
They trailed 13-0 and the crowd of 10,444 — a record for all NIT games this year — wasn’t just silenced, it was stunned.
And it would get worse.
Stalled comebacks
Some four minutes later, the Flyers would lose their leader, point guard Javon Bennett, the team’s leading scorer, after a play that drew contact near midcourt and left him with what Grant thought was an oblique injury.
Bennett came to the bench at 11:29 of the first half and never returned to the game.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
The Flyers fell behind by 19; clawed back to within five and then tumbled back to a 19-point deficit again.
Late in the game they had made just one of 20 three-point attempts — that’s just 5 percent — and they finished with 3-for-25 accuracy from beyond the arc (12 percent).
With the press causing Illinois State to turn the ball over, UD again surged back to a five-point deficit with 2:26 left, but eventually stalled again.
Illinois State won 61-53 in a game that often wasn’t that close.
UD never led the entire night.
Three Flyers — Bennett who only took one shot before his injury; Jaiun Simon who started but played just 6 ½ minutes; and Jacob Conner, who went 0-for-6 from the field, with five of those attempts from long range — went scoreless.
Bryce Heard led the way with 12 points; Derkack had 11 and Amaël L’Etang added 10.
Johnny Kinziger led the 23-12 Redbirds with 16 points. Chase Walker, a 6-foot-9 junior forward from Columbus, had 13 and Ty Pence added 12.
Afterward, Derkack, admirably but wrongly, stepped up to shoulder the blame: “I think I could have done a better job as a leader.”
In truth, everybody shared the responsibility for this miserable outing.
But he was right about one thing.
Through most of this game, UD was lacking leadership.
‘This wasn’t our finest hour’
UD and Illinois State met in the NIT at UD Arena in 2010 and the Flyers prevailed 63-42 in front of a crowd of 5,127, the smallest to ever see a UD game (discounting the COVID games) at the Arena.
Yet even with the disappointment of this team not making the NCAA Tournament field, the Flyer faithful turned out Wednesday night.
The crowd more than doubled that 2010 turnout, after which the Flyers went on to win the NIT title at Madison Square Garden.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Pedon and Pence, the Redbirds guard, all saluted the crowd afterward. So did Anthony Grant.
“We’ve never played in front of this many people as a program,” said Pedon.
The Redbirds’ CEFCU Arena holds 9,600 people and this season the average attendance for home games was 4,489.
The team played just four games in front of crowds of over 6,000, though one game at Bradley did draw 10,542.
The Redbirds 13-0 run to start the game silenced the crowd for a good while. Each Flyer comeback did enliven the Arena, but in the final minute when it was obvious UD would not be advancing to the NIT semifinals at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis next week, many fans streamed toward the exits.
They left having endured a 25-12 season with some great highs: non-conference wins over Marquette, Georgetown and Florida State; a six-game winning streak to start Atlantic 10 play; and that 11-3 mark coming into Wednesday night’s game.
There were also some real lows: falling to Liberty at home; losing five of six games including two massive blowouts as January turned to February; and then falling to VCU in the A-10 title game that cost a trip to the NCAA Tournament.
Derkack, who finished his college career Wednesday night, said in the postgame locker room he had stressed to the younger players that they should remember the “sting” they were feeling from this loss and should use it as fuel next season.
Whether that comes to be remains to be seen in these days where players often leave the sting behind and move on to a new school thanks to the transfer portal and the lure of NIL money elsewhere.
Wednesday night, Grant said he wasn’t ready to focus on how his roster would look once the comings and goings begin. He was immersed in the moment at hand:
“I thought mentally and physically this wasn’t our finest hour.”
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