In their first game following a break for final exams, the Bradley men’s basketball team snapped a nine game skid against Division-II Maryville University, winning 61-53.
The Braves were still getting over final exam insomnia for the first five minutes of the game, as the Saints went ahead 11-5 by taking advantage of three Bradley turnovers, and shooting 5-8 from the field.
“We still have a lot to work on,” freshman guard Antoine Pittman said. “We still had 14 turnovers, we still need to get that [number] a little lower, we still want to grow and become a better team.”
However, as soon as the game got back into action after the second media timeout of the half, the Braves soared.
The 11-5 Maryville lead quickly capsized into a 24-14 Bradley lead with a 19-0 run, erasing any trace of the Brave’s lazy start.
“We’ve got to stop coming out slow,” sophomore forward Donte Thomas said. “This was probably our first game coming out slow in a while but next game, for sure, we’ve got to come out faster.”
Thomas started the long Bradley run, which spanned only three minutes, with a jumper at the 11:35 mark of the first half.
From there, five other Braves scored during their 19-0 run, which was sparked by two keys hammered home by head coach Brian Wardle during the second media timeout: play better defense and grab offensive rebounds.
“We needed to pick it up defensively,” Thomas, who scored nine points on the night to go along with three blocks, said. “From the beginning we knew they were a scoring team, they almost average 80 points per game against their opponents, and we knew that.”
Following that run, the Braves went into halftime with a 34-21 lead but came out in the second half as flat as the first half.
But this time, the lack of offense spanned over the entire second half.
“[I] thought the second half we got stagnant offensively, a little tentative,” Wardle said. “We’ve just got to continue to learn and grow from the offensive side of the things for sure.”
The Braves shot a sluggish 33 percent from the field after shooting a vibrant 50 percent in the first half.
However, the defense picked up where the offense slacked.
The Braves defense forced nine second half turnovers and blocked four shots, including a Thomas block late in the second which prevented the Saints from cutting Bradley’s lead to six with a minute remaining.
“I was proud of our defensive effort, [Maryville] scores on a lot of backdoors and face cuts,” Wardle said. “We did a good job in that sense of defending. We just need to get better offensively, continue getting better at making decisions and helping ourselves when it comes to runs and momentum swings.”
The Braves outlasted the Saints, and more importantly snapping a nine game losing streak in the process.
This was the first Bradley win since Nov. 13.
“I just tell them, ‘we’ve still got improvements to make,’” Wardle said. “This is still a grind of a season and we’ve got to get better tomorrow. You get a win, you enjoy it, and then you move on the next day.”
