• Dayton has never won the tournament outside UD Arena.
• Dayton has played in 34 conference tournaments (27 in the A-10, two in the Great Midwest and five in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference) and won two championships. The other championship, in 1990, was also won at UD Arena.
Dayton doesn’t need to win the A-10 tournament in 2024 because it has already locked up a NCAA tournament at-large berth. It wants to win the championship because it hasn’t won it in so long and came so close the last two seasons. For the Flyers, the mindset doesn’t change from 2022 and 2023 when they had to win three games in the tournament to earn a NCAA berth.
“We’re going to play for a championship,” Dayton coach Anthony Grant said Tuesday at the Cronin Center, about four hours before his team departed for Brooklyn, N.Y.
How much do DaRon Holmes II, the A-10 Co-Player of the Year, and Koby Brea, the A-10 Sixth Man of the Year, want to win the tournament?
“Very bad,” he said Friday after a 91-86 overtime victory. “We want to make it as far as we can and win the whole thing.”
“It would mean everything because I’ve been here for years now,” Brea said, “and it’s something that we haven’t done yet.”
The quest starts for No. 3 seed and 24th-ranked Dayton (24-6) at 7:30 p.m. Thursday with a quarterfinal game against No. 6 Duquesne (20-11) or No. 14 Saint Louis (13-19) at the Barclays Center. Duquesne and Saint Louis play in the second round at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.
The tournament started Tuesday with three close first-round games.
• No. 12 seed Fordham beat No. 13 Davidson 73-61 in overtime in the first game. Fordham guard Kyle Rose sent the game to overtime by scoring on a layup with 2.1 seconds remaining.
• No. 10 La Salle beat No. 15 George Washington 61-60 in the second game. Jhamir Brickus made the go-ahead shot with 20.8 seconds to play.
• In the final game of the day, No. 14 Saint Louis beat No. 11 Rhode Island 64-61. Former Dayton coach Archie Miller’s second season ended when his team missed two 3-pointers in the final seconds.
Dayton finished third in the regular season and lost to the two teams above it on the road but is a favorite in this tournament, according to KenPom.com. The website’s math gives Dayton a 39.1% chance of winning the title. Dayton was the favorite last year, too, with 33% odds and in 2022 when it had a 26.7% chance of winning.
Two years ago, Dayton was the No. 2 seed and lost 68-64 to No. 6 seed Richmond in the semifinals. The Flyers had the lead at halftime. Then point guard Malachi Smith hurt his ankle in the final seconds of the first half. Without him, the Flyers stretched their lead to 15 points early in the second half only to run out of steam in the final minutes.
Last year, Dayton made the championship game as the No. 2 seed despite more injury issues. Kobe Elvis didn’t play in the tournament. Mike Sharavjamts played limited minutes in two games after missing the first game. Malachi Smith and Brea played in pain, as they had all season.
Dayton beat Saint Joseph’s and Fordham before losing 68-56 to No. 1 seed VCU in the championship game. Once again Dayton had a double-digit lead in the second half — 11 points this time — but faded late, missing its last 15 shots and giving up a game-ending 11-0 run.
With three A-10 tournament victories in the last two seasons, Dayton surpassed its total victory count in its last five tournament appearances. It won one game in 2016 and 2021 and lost its first game in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The 2020 tournament, when Dayton was the No. 1 seed, was cancelled because of the pandemic.
Holmes hopes the experiences of the last two seasons help the Flyers, though he, Brea and Elvis are the only players in the current rotation who played in the tournament the last two seasons.
“We were very close the last two years,” Holmes said. “We want to capitalize this year.”
The return of point guard Javon Bennett would help. Dayton won two games without him last week as he recovered from a left thumb injury. He returned to practice Monday, 10 days after suffering the injury in hte first half of a 77-72 loss at Loyola Chicago. Grant said “if everything goes well the next couple of days,” Bennett should be available for the A-10 tournament.
“He’s been a big huge part of everything we’ve done all season long,” Grant said, “so having him back in the fold would be great.”
Dayton needs the depth. Against VCU on Friday, all five starters played more than 40 minutes with Petras Padegimas playing 10 minutes off the bench and Isaac Jack and Brady Uhl each seeing two minutes of action.
If the Flyers win three games in four days in Brooklyn, they’ll hoist a trophy for the first time since winning the ESPN Events Invitational in November 2021 and make history as the first Dayton team to a conference tournament on the road.
“For me, it’s about our group and about the guys that we’ve got a chance to coach and the experiences these guys have gone through,” Grant said. “Some of the guys on the team have some heartbreaking experiences in terms of what we’ve had to endure throughout the tournament, from Malachi’s injury to last year falling short in the championship game. So I’d like to see for this group to have the opportunity to experience what it feels like to be a champion.”
THURSDAY’S GAME
Dayton vs. Duquesne or Saint Louis, 7:30 p.m., USA Network, 1290, 95.7
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