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Lamarr Kimble is ready for a ‘Fresh’ start for St. Joseph’s at Atlantic 10 Tournament | Mike Jensen

The Hawks guard, back from injury, believes his team is going to Brooklyn ready to perform.

Fresh Kimble
Fresh KimbleRead moreYONG KIM / Staff Photographer

Time for a Fresh take on this St. Joseph’s Hawks basketball season.

Hawks guard Lamarr “Fresh” Kimble is always worth checking in with, and he sat down the other day on Hawk Hill just before a practice, before the Hawks left for Brooklyn and their first Atlantic 10 Tournament game, Thursday at 6 p.m. against Duquesne.

The other guys are the 7th seed Thursday night, while the Hawks are the 10th seed. Good enough to have avoided Wednesday’s games for the bottom four A-10 teams, but hardly what was expected of St. Joseph’s this season. The winner of Thursday’s game will face No. 2 Davidson Friday evening.

That 2 seed was more like what had been forecast of St. Joe’s, picked second in the league preseason by the coaches, which didn’t seem out of line.

So what happened? What missed that produced a 13-18 regular season, 6-12 in the A-10?

“I just think we probably were a little too high on ourselves, not understanding how it is to come in day-by-day and try to make yourself a great team, rather just being a good team," Kimble said.

He knows the difference. He started for a Hawks team that came within a play or so of advancing to the NCAA Sweet 16 in 2016 after winning the A-10 Tournament.

Since then, the Hawks have been trying to get back to good, still a long fast break from great.

“I think we just did the things to be good — now we’re starting to figure out the things it takes to be great," Kimble said. “Even though we lost the last two games, we still see our offense coming together, our defense coming together.”

St. Joe’s has proved it can be dangerous. No team in Brooklyn would look at a bracket and say, “Oh, good, we have the Hawks.” Davidson and St. Louis had both split games with St. Joe’s this season. La Salle, too. So it’s not like they couldn’t stay with teams that ended up higher in the standings.

Also, any team with Fresh Kimble starts by having a chance. The pride of Neumann-Goretti High, a third-year captain despite having another year of eligibility remaining, presumably has been the heartbeat of every team he’s ever played on. The last two A-10 tourneys, he wasn’t there for the Hawks, already lost to injury for the season.

I’d forgotten that it was two seasons, not just one. Kimble obviously hasn’t. Three straight seemed on the table after he broke a bone in his right hand at Duquesne in January and missed 10 games.

Asked about the frustration — Another injury? Not again, Kimble said, “This one was a little bit different this time around, because I was able to actually come back to the season.”

He was trying to make something happen when the injury happened.

“I went to the basket on the break," Kimble said of the play at Duquesne. “I was pushing down the floor and I went up for a layup. A guy kind of hit me on the outside of my body trying to block it, and I kind of flipped and tumbled over. I happened to land on my hand.”

He kept playing. Could he feel it?

“I could feel it," Kimble said of the fractured bone. "I kind of already knew it. I decided I’ll play defense for my team and you know, see what happens from there. If you watch that game, I wasn’t too involved with dribbling after that happened. Even my shots, they weren’t even near, so I was just trying to be more vocal in the game, like that.”

No surgery was a blessing. The injury, while providing yet another example of what Kimble is all about, doesn’t fully explain this season, since St. Joe’s already was struggling when he went down. Nobody on Hawk Hill, from coaches to players, is willing to use that as an excuse.

“I feel like we’re actually playing our best basketball right now," Kimble said.

» READ MORE: More than a mascot, the St. Joe’s Hawk flaps on

Everybody individually was working on their games to be better, Kimble said. He’s not trying to call anybody out.

“It’s about being able to bring it together collectively as a group and make that as great as possible," Kimble said. “Sometimes that comes with not taking as many shots, or taking this role as a player on the team, things like that. I feel like we all had to figure that out.”

That can all get tricky, figuring out when to force action and when to keep the ball moving.

“The past few games, the ball’s been moving very well — we’ve been getting a lot of people shots," Kimble said. “People have been making shots. It’s been starting to click, starting to mesh.”

So there’s an excitement to having a fresh start now? … Oops, sorry, that one was inadvertent.

“No, you’re good," Fresh said with a chuckle. “There definitely is — 0-0, new season. We come in on a high about ourselves, knowing we didn’t play our best basketball yet. It’s going to start with Thursday.”