CAA tourney: Drexel must win 4 games with 7 players

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A few hours before boarding a bus to Baltimore for the 2015 CAA men’s basketball tournament, Drexel head coach Bruiser Flint was wished luck.

“We’re gonna need it,” he said without missing a beat. “We’re definitely gonna need it.”

Few teams in the country have had worse luck than Drexel, which dressed only seven players for its final two games of the regular season because or a rash of untimely injuries.

And now, the severely shorthanded Dragons (11-18, 9-9) face the daunting prospect of needing to win four games in four days, starting with their CAA tourney opener against Charleston on Friday (8:30 p.m.) at the Royal Farms Arena in Baltimore, to win their conference and secure an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

It’s March, so anything’s possible … but this?

“I mean, you just gotta go out and play,” Flint said. “It’s been a tough season because every time we felt as though we got some momentum, someone else went down. But we know what we have in front of us and we’re trying to prepare for it.”

While the Dragons have dealt with injuries throughout the season — and much of the two seasons before that, as well — the biggest blow came less than two weeks ago when Damion Lee, the nation’s fourth-leading scorer and named to the first team all-CAA (see story), broke his hand.

That the injury happened during a game in which Lee still poured in 30 points is a testament to how talented the junior guard is and how valuable he is to the Dragons. Shortly before he went down, Drexel had reeled off six straight wins and looked like they could be a force in a conference tourney without a runaway favorite.

“I thought we were playing a lot better, so going into conference tournament play, I was like, ‘OK, we might have a pretty good chance of doing this,’” Flint said. “But I guess I was looking too far ahead because I lose two more guys before it starts.”

The other player that got hurt the same week as Lee was freshman Sammy Mojica, who had been coming on strong before spraining his knee when he slipped on a wet spot at practice. Those two joined Major Canady, Kazembe Abif and Sooren Derboghosian as players on the shelf with season-ending injuries.

Sophomore forward Rodney Williams also missed about a month of action but now joins guards Freddie Wilson, Tavon Allen, Rashann London and fellow sophomore big man Mohamed Bah in Drexel’s overworked starting lineup. Four of them played all 40 minutes in Saturday’s regular-season finale.

“We’ve just gotta go out there and continue to play hard and do it for the guys that aren’t out there,” Allen said. “We’re gonna let them know, ‘We’ve got your back and we’re gonna try our hardest to get a ‘W’ for you.’ That’s our main focus — to play hard for them.”

Allen, the team’s top scorer with Lee out, didn’t seem overly concerned about the possibility of playing a few games in a row, saying that “we’re still young, so we got a little bit of legs left.” But it is a very real concern how to keep everyone fresh.

If seventh-seeded the Dragons knocks off 10th-seeded Charleston — a team they swept in the regular season — they’ll move on to play second-seeded UNC Wilmington in Saturday’s quarterfinals. The CAA semifinals will then be held Sunday and the finals Monday.

“We can’t play fast because we don’t have a lot of guys,” said Wilson, a senior transfer from Seton Hall. “So we can’t just sprint up and down the court. We’re gonna have to take our time on offense and play smart on defense. We’ll just try to conserve the most energy we can because that’s a lot of games.”

Still, there is reason to believe Drexel might be able to go on a run. In Saturday’s regular-season finale, the battered Dragons pulled off a stunningly easy 80-66 win over first-place William & Mary on the road — a result that not only showed the conference is wide open but also that they have a lot of heart.

“I think that gives us hope,” Flint said. “I think we’ve always felt as though we can beat any team in this conference. Our big thing is if we go out and play the type of game we played against William & Mary, then we’ve got a chance against anybody.”

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