La Salle's Tyreek Duren embodies Explorer toughness

THE FIRST two games of La Salle's NCAA Tournament had not gone particularly well for junior point guard Tyreek Duren. The third game, on Sunday night against Mississippi, was much better. He looked like himself again - decisive, authoritative, lightning to the basket sometimes, calm and distributive other times.

Then there was the last time.

Thirty-two seconds to go. Tie game in Kansas City's Sprint Center. A trip to the Sweet 16en on the line. No pressure, then.

The ball was inbounded and it was Duren's to possess. The Ole Miss players sat back. This was going to come down to a final assault at the hoop and everyone in the building acknowledged as much.

Most of us would have had trouble breathing. Duren, though, dribbled calmly, standing in place, surveying, waiting.

"You have to stay focused," he said. "As a point guard, you have to keep your composure. If you don't keep your composure, you've already lost. You're already done."

Thirty-two seconds became 22, and 22 became 12. "At first, I was just trying to read the defense," Duren said. "I knew they weren't going to show me what they were going to do in the first few seconds. I knew around, maybe, 10 seconds they would start shifting."

First, Duren thought he saw an opening up the middle. Then, he said, the Ole Miss defense moved. Then he made up his mind.

"I saw them shift over and that's when I figured out what I was going to do," he said. "I knew I was going to go left and probably hit Ty [Garland] on a curl. That's mainly what we work on in practice, and it worked perfectly."

Duren dribbled left. Garland basically just followed him. What happened from there is now the stuff of lore, instant lore, the Southwest Philly Floater that Garland used to launch the Explorers into a trip to Los Angeles and the NCAA West Regional semifinals against Wichita State.

"It looked like it was going to fall out of the rim," Duren said, smiling the smile of someone who seems to understand how good this whole La Salle run is, and how precarious, even as he is in the middle of it.

When Duren says, "I think we've just proven a lot of people wrong," he is right, of course. But it is a little more than that. Because this is the first look a lot of people are getting at the La Salle basketball program, they did not have the knowledge base to have a valid opinion. People weren't right or wrong - they just didn't know.

"All coaches talk about the right stuff," said John Giannini, the Explorers' coach. "But the student has to be willing and I have willing students. That's the difference. I'll get a lot of credit now. I got a lot of blame in the past for certain situations and I'm the same guy. What's different is the players. These guys have been willing students, just wonderful."

Duren is one of those willing students. He was a great player in high school at Neumann-Goretti who stayed at home and continued to grow. But in the first two tournament games, against Boise State and Kansas State, Duren's game was abnormally quiet.

"People don't always play their best - I just attribute it to normal variation," Giannini said. "I expect him to play great all the time but, of course, no one does. But [the Ole Miss game] is what I expect of him. I'm surprised when he doesn't play great."

So what happened?

"I just came out more aggressive," Duren said. "I had a lot of people in my circle telling me what to do. They said I had to start pushing the ball and being more aggressive. I just wasn't playing like myself, but I think in this game I got back to the way I should be playing."

Because here is the thing about Duren, really about all of them: If they don't play with an aggressive edge, they are likely to lose. If their overall quickness is the best thing about them as a group, that ability to battle is next in importance. It is absolutely why they beat Kansas State, and it is why they hung in against Mississippi and found themselves in a position to make that final play.

"When you play four guards, when you play with a team that's so small, you're always shorter than who you're playing," Duren said. "Because of that, you've got to have toughness or else you're going to get punched and you'll end up laying down. If you don't have toughness, you won't be able to get up from that punch.

"That's what G has been emphasizing for the last two seasons now, that we're going to be smaller than a lot of the teams that we play and that we're going to have to out-tough them. I think we did a really good job with that here."

Starting with the guy who was out near midcourt on Sunday night, dribbling . . . waiting . . . watching . . . 32 . . . 22 . . . 12 . . .