La Salle’s hot start has Fran Dunphy thinking Explorers are ‘going to be OK’

It didn’t matter to Fran Dunphy whether Khalil Brantley’s halfcourt heave went through the hoop or not. The La Salle coach had seen enough in his team’s Big 5 Classic third-place game vs. Penn at the Wells Fargo Center.

Sure, he’d have liked to see a bit more defense, but his Explorers erased an eight-point deficit in the final five minutes to reach overtime just three nights after doing the same with a nine-point deficit vs. Temple. There was no questioning the guts of his team, even before those moments, but at one point in the second half, Dunphy said he turned to his group and said, “I think we’ve arrived.”

“I think there’s something you see in teams, every coach sees in his team opportunities,” Dunphy said. “I just thought we did a bunch of good things against Penn — we did a bunch of knucklehead things, too — but a bunch of good things that I thought we were going to be OK. Whatever we did in that particular game, we were going to be OK moving forward.”

The Explorers have won their last two since that Penn win on Brantley’s prayer. They again trailed inside of five minutes, this time by 11, in a comeback win over Loyola (Md.) last Wednesday before beating Lafayette Saturday on the road, 67-51.

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La Salle, picked 15th of 15 teams in the Atlantic 10′s preseason poll, is 8-2 and takes its show on the road Saturday to Florida vs. No. 24 Miami. La Salle’s only defeats are a road loss at No. 21 Duke and a triple-overtime loss at Temple.

“We’re OK, but we’re still an absolute work in progress,” Dunphy said. “We still have a long, long way to go.

“I think we’ve tested our guys greatly and we’ve been fortunate to win some games that went our way.”

Every team needs some good fortune from time to time, though Dunphy knows how fortunate La Salle was to win the Penn game. “Brantley could do that another thousand times and maybe not make that same shot,” he said.

La Salle has a trio of guards in Brantley, Jhamir Brickus, and Anwar Gill who combine for 44 points per game and make the Explorers a difficult team to beat on any night. But the impact play from Daeshon Shepherd and Andrés Marrero has helped La Salle get over the hump in a few of its wins. Shepherd, a junior from Archbishop Wood, is playing 33.9 minutes per game after playing 18.2 last season. He’s scoring 10.2 points and pulling in 6.1 rebounds per contest and has had his share of highlight-reel plays above the rim.

Marrero, meanwhile, has been a three-point ace. The redshirt sophomore from Venezuela is 23-for-48 (47.9%) from three-point range. He earned Big 5 Player of the Week honors last week after making six threes in the win over Loyola (Md.) and another five vs. Lafayette.

“He’s got that ability to make shots and that’s a great thing of value to any team,” Dunphy said. Though the coach, always looking for improvement, said he still wants Marrero to work on “being available to get more shots. It’s one thing making shots, but before you make them you have to get them.”

Messages and coaching from Dunphy seem to be resonating. Gill praised Dunphy as “one of the greatest coaches in world history” after Dunphy earned his 600th win in late November.

“I’ll run through a thousand brick walls for this man,” Brantley said of Dunphy after hitting his buzzer beater at the Wells Fargo Center.

The Explorers have eight wins before conference play for the first time since 2019. Their schedule, however, hasn’t been terribly difficult — KenPom had it rated 352nd out of 362 teams as of Wednesday morning. And La Salle has been pretty fortunate to win a few of its games.

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Still, all that matters is what’s in the win column, and Dunphy has been doing this long enough to be trusted when it comes to knowing when a team has “arrived.”

What does arriving mean?

“It’s kind of like when you’re a young man,” Dunphy said. “You wake up one morning and look in the mirror. You might be 25, I was probably closer to 30, looked in the mirror and said ‘I’m going to be all right. I’m an OK guy, I’m going to be all right.’

“It’s that kind of feeling when you get into this situation. You’re watching your team. You watch them every day. You watch them in every game. There’s an arrival that says, ‘You’re going to be all right.’ That’s where I think I am and I’m hoping they can prove me as a prophetic dude, not a pathetic dude.”

Regarding prophecies, Brantley had a few things to say after beating Penn.

“We know the preseason rankings had us at the bottom of the A-10,” he said. “As a team, we got that on our bulletin board in our locker room. I don’t know why, maybe because a couple people transferred, but they always throw us at the bottom because La Salle isn’t … I don’t know, we’re trying to get the culture back to winning.

“We know what we’re capable of and what we can do this year. We might not surprise ourselves, but we’re going to surprise a lot of people.”