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Duren's replacement key to La Salle's maintaining success

08/04/2014, 1:45pm EDT

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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As far as La Salle head coach John Giannini is concerned, Tyreek Duren wasn’t his team’s starting point guard for the last four years.

Sure, Duren did start all 132 games he played in during his four-year career as an Explorer. And he did lead the team in assists in three of his four years there.

That’s all besides the point.

“You know what’s amazing, and people would be shocked to understand this, we never told our team that Tyreek was the point guard,” Giannini said. “We want all of our guards to be able to handle the ball, we want all our guards to be able to make plays. But players do figure out who to get the ball to at the right time and when it’s a guy like Tyreek, the ball finds him all the time.”

Perhaps “ball-finder” isn’t going to catch on as a new position even in a game whose five original positions–point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward and center, for those who needed a reminder–seem to be fading into a mix of combo guards, stretch-forwards and the like. Giannini has stressed for years that all of his guards need to be able to “dribble, pass and shoot,” and his recent group of Duren, Sam Mills, Ty Garland and 2013 grad Ramon Galloway certainly seemed to fit that formula.

But it’s no coincidence that Duren always seemed to wind up with the ball in his hands as the shot clock ticked down, and his 500 assists are fourth all-time in the school’s long basketball history. And now he–along with Mills and Garland–have graduated and moved on to the next stage of their careers, leaving Giannini with just one backcourt piece (6-foot-5 senior wing D.J. Peterson) remaining from the program’s 2013 Sweet 16 run.

“I’m not happy how it ended,” Duren told CoBL last week after a Delco Pro-Am semifinal, referring to a disappointing 2013-14 season that saw the Explorers fail to live up to the expectations set the season before, going just 15-16 overall. “But I’m happy how everything went, how we got better every year and all of that. Everybody expected big things from us coming off that Sweet 16 run, so I wasn’t happy how it ended, but I had a good career.”

If La Salle is going to bounce back from last season, the biggest question mark is who will fill that role on this year’s Explorers. The frontcourt is solid, with rising seniors and three-year starters Jerrell Wright (13.3 ppg, 6.6 rpg) and Steve Zack (8.8 ppg, 9.5 rpg) returning along with reserves Rohan Brown, Jermaine Davis and redshirt freshman Tony Washington.

The scoring of Garland (12.5 ppg) and Mills (7.6 ppg) is likely to come from a pair of transfers in Jordan Price (Auburn) and Cleon Roberts (Georgia Southern), who both sat out last season. due to NCAA transfer rules. The former ESPN top-60 recruit Price and sharpshooting wing Roberts are both going to make an impact once they take the court on November 14 against Colgate.

“I think Jordan has got a chance to be one of the best guards in the A-10 with his size and strength,” Duren said. “I think they’re going to be real good this year, I expect big things from them.”

There are three players on this year’s La Salle team, then, who are the combined x-factor. And no matter who starts, it’ll be someone who like Duren had that opportunity since his freshman year.

Junior guard Khalid Lewis was a true freshman when he began his college career at Delaware, averaging 5.2 ppg and 2.6 apg alongside high-scoring guard Devon Saddler on a 2011-12 Blue Hens team that went 18-14. He elected to transfer to La Salle that summer, sitting out the 2012-13 season, but injuries and the senior-laden Explorer backcourt last season limited him to just about 14 minutes per game, averaging 3.0 ppg and 0.9 apg.

Then there are two actual freshmen: Amar Stukes, who redshirted last year, and Johnnie Shuler, a true freshman and the D.C. Player of the Year as a senior. Stukes is a solid 6-3 with a nifty ability to score around the hoop and the court vision to make some excellent passes, while Shuler is a quicker and smaller 6-0 point guard that relies on his outside shooting and top-end speed to blow past defenders.

The most likely candidate at this point seems to be Stukes, a Philly native and LaSalle HS grad who used that redshirt year to get more acclimated to the college game and most importantly learn from Duren. Now it’s expected that Stukes, who has a nice size advantage on his predecessor, will slide into that role.

“I think that’s a perfect piece,” Duren said of Stukes. “The only thing with him, he got an extra year of experience by redshirting. So I think he could be a step ahead of [where I was as a freshman].”

But it could very easily be Lewis or Shuler, and all three will get a chance to show what they can do in exhibitions and early on in the year.

And they all have that quality that Giannini looks for. And they don’t necessarily have to play out there one at a time–in fact, Giannini said the only reason the three haven’t been used as a backcourt yet during summer workouts is that it would leave the opposing team without someone to run its offense.

“Guys like Amar and Khalid and Johnnie Shuler are natural point guards,” Giannini said. “Those guys find the ball naturally and their teammates find them naturally. What we have been able to see this summer [also] is those guys can play together pretty easily as well.”

If it is Stukes, who many have been expecting to take the starting job this fall after redshirting last season and learning from Duren, that means that Giannini could have three starting “point guards” in a span of 12 years. Rodney Green manned the position from 2006-10, and then it was Duren who took over from 2010-14.

Before Giannini was at La Salle, he was the head coach at Maine, where he watched the University of Vermont have a similar transition at their point guard position, with three starters going four years apiece.

“The continuity was tremendous, their development was tremendous,” Giannini said. “Certainly when that guy starts out his freshman year, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but the benefits of continuity and development are well worth it.”

That level of sustained talent could mean last season’s disappointment was only a bump in the road, rather than a return to form after picking up 45 wins over the two years prior. The Explorers haven’t won 80 games in a four-year stretch since Speedy Morris got them to four NCAA Tournaments in a five-year span between 1987-88 and 1991-92, the second-best time in the program’s history other than that 1954 national championship.

If Lewis, Stukes and Shuler can bring some of what Duren brought to the table, while Price and Roberts provide the scoring punch–along with that frontcourt–then this could be a team to watch.

“I think we brought the La Salle name back and I think it’s going to help with the recruiting,” Duren said. “They’re giving La Salle that big name again, like where they used to be, back in the day.”