With a guy as hulking, sturdy and strapping as Radford's 6-foot-11 senior center Artsiom Parakhouski, you know stopping him cold is out of the question.

It just isn't going to happen.

Or, as Duquesne junior forward Damian Saunders put it, "He's going to get his, for sure."

Parakhouski, from Belarus, got his yesterday but no one else from Radford seemed to do much to complement his effort.

Duquesne (5-1) countered with balance to earn a 71-63 non-conference victory against the Highlanders (2-2) yesterday at the A.J. Palumbo Center.

Of Radford's 63 points, Parakhouski -- who, Duquesne coach Ron Everhart said, "is an NBA guy" -- scored 26. He also pulled down 20 of his team's 46 rebounds.

"A caliber guy like that will still get his numbers," Saunders said of the reigning Big South Conference player of the year, who came in averaging 24.7 points and 14.7 rebounds this season. "But we did a job on him, I'd give it a C-plus for a grade on him."

If that was the grading curve, Duquesne's balance on offense gets at least an A.

The Dukes were paced by a career high 21 points from sophomore B.J. Monteiro, got 14 points apiece from Saunders and junior swingman Bill Clark, and 11 from sophomore guard Eric Evans. Duquesne's other starter, senior Jason Duty, scored six.

Monteiro's productivity was particularly encouraging because he is the player being counted on, perhaps more than any other right now, to help the Dukes. When sophomore swingman Melquan Bolding injured his wrist in the season opening win against Nicholls State and had subsequent surgery Nov. 17, it was announced he would be out about a month, maybe more.

That immediately thrust Monteiro from his original duties as a sixth man into a starting role.

"He's listening to what I am asking him to do," Everhart said of Monteiro. "Early on, I thought he was forcing some things. I thought B.J. was thinking 'Hey, coach, I want you to see me score and force things so that you keep me on the floor.' He was still in that mindset of a role player ... Now though, he's taking a leap really quickly."

In terms of getting everyone involved, it was obvious yesterday which team was leaps and bounds beyond the other.

Parakhouski was, quite literally, half of his team's output in the first half. He scored 10 of Radford's 21 points and grabbed 13 of the Highlanders' 26 rebounds as the Dukes secured a 26-21 halftime lead in a game they last trailed with 3:37 left in the first half.

But Duquesne, which bounced back from its only loss of the season after winning its first four, was able to push its advantage to 50-38 midway through the second half and fend the Highlanders off from there.

The Dukes under Everhart have been a team with a penchant to score a lot of points but yesterday -- even though they shot just 18 for 34 from the free-throw line -- was more of a gritty, roll-your-sleeves up showcase.

The Dukes buckled down on defense, got stops when Radford would make a surge and forced the Highlanders into 20 turnovers while coming up with 13 steals -- four of them by Evans.

"We guarded them well and effectively," said Everhart, whose team did the same thing to Iowa in a 52-50 win early this month. "The good thing is that our guys are learning to win ugly and do it with defense, and I thought that's what happened for us."

And it was Saunders who turned in a solid job in the post, when asked to perform a gargantuan task. At 6-7, Saunders was giving away 4 inches to Parakhouski, and even though the Radford center was a huge chunk of his team's offensive output, Saunders sat down in the post and clashed with him time and again, never shying away from contact.

"He was a one-man wrecking crew in there at times," Everhart said of Saunders.

For his part, Saunders said, "We had to get physical with [Parakhouski], knock him around a little bit."

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