It was a familiar sight for sure: Duquesne forward Ovie Soko towering above the paint and standing at the free-throw line. Soko, a 6-foot-8-inch, 225-pound forward with bulging shoulder muscles, looked statuesque.

And with a little more than three minutes remaining in the game, he was eyeing the basket, toeing the stripe for the 18th time Saturday and trying to avoid missing the second of these two foul shots. Pitt had broken the game open, establishing a 12-point lead at that point. This, of course, came after Duquesne had stormed back in the first half.

Then Pitt weathered that torrid resurgence, and the pace shifted gears for a Duquesne team that aims to push the tempo, score points and be aggressive in driving to the basket. It’s tough to out-run the opponent when most of the time you’re sauntering to the free-throw line for points.

“It’s tough,” Soko said of trying to sustain speedy attacks with a slew of fouls and other game stoppages. 

“That’s what you saw us bank on, is being able to get stops and fly back the other way,” he continued, flinging his index finger forward to indicate that immediate transition from defense to offense. “But when the game is stopping so frequently, it tough to get that flow that you want to in the game where you can use speed to your advantage.”

“They shot 35 free throws [in total],” Pitt head coach Jamie Dixon said, though he wasn’t pleased with the number of fouls his team surrendered, noting that this many free throws “slows down the tempo.”

Pitt led by 11 with 15:30 left in the first half, but Duquesne’s comeback led it to its largest lead of four points with 6:42 remaining. In those nine minutes and 48 seconds where Duquesne raced the court and poured in points, there were 10 stoppages in play — eight fouls and two timeouts — which works out to nearly one foul per minute.

“I thought we started playing more aggressively,” Duquesne coach Jim Ferry said of the first-half comeback. “Offensive execution helped us get back in the basketball game, our forwards’ ability to drive the basketball, to grind it back.”

In the second half, though, when Pitt pulled away, momentum stopped throughout the period. There were 31 stoppages — six timeouts and 25 fouls — in 20 minutes.

Duquesne head coach Jim Ferry said his team tried to sustain that first-half pace, but it was difficult to do so in the second.

“It’s the way we play, we try to maintain it,” Ferry said. “The issue is Pitt plays very fast this year as well, so they can play at that pace. They had some more guys to do it. You saw us kinda slow down a little bit in the second half. You saw some fatigue.”

That fatigue can be partially attributed to Duquesne’s missing player, Micah Mason. The Dukes used just nine players, whereas  Pitt used 10, an advantage for spelling players who need breathers and those who find themselves in foul trouble.

But sophomore guard James Robinson said he didn’t think Duquesne’s speed posed a challenge to the Panthers because they matched the Dukes’ pace.

“They had what would be five perimeter players out there,” Robinson said. “I think we did a pretty solid job in terms of helping each other out.”

While Robinson answered the question in a postgame press conference, redshirt senior forward Lamar Patterson and redshirt junior guard Cameron Wright sat next to the freshman guard, their demeanors and actions reinforcing the same idea.

 The idea that the Panthers were somewhat fazed by the Dukes’ quick-paced offense was brushed off almost as easily as the second-half scoreline shows.

“It really was just one-on-one and drive you,” Dixon said to describe the Dukes’ offensive strategy. “Obviously if they’re getting to the free-throw line 35 times, we’re doing something wrong. We gotta handle that better. We knew what they were gonna do, and it was clearly evident.”

It’s evident because, as Ferry said, it’s how the Dukes play and practice every day.

“We’re a young team. I am not going to all of the sudden say, ‘Whoa, let’s not do this in this game against Pitt because Pitt runs.’ We have to establish who we are and focus on who we are [and] what we do, and we’ve been doing a pretty good job of it. So I wasn’t really going to dictate changing up the tempo.”

On the day, Soko shot 20 free throws and made just 11 of them.

Soko’s 18th free throw was off the mark — another familiar sight — and Patterson grabbed the rebound, quickly firing an outlet pass to Wright near midcourt. Wright hauled in the pass, darted toward the 3-point line, then threw on the breaks.

He put his left hand in the air, signaling that the offense should slow down. Pitt bled 32 seconds off the clock, slowing the Dukes’ tempo and cementing another dominating Panthers performance.