With Bradley (22-7, 13-5 MVC) and Murray State (14-15, 8-10 MVC) tied at 83 in overtime, senior guard Duke Deen drove the length of the court and heaved a pull-up three from multiple steps behind the arch.
He drained it.
Deen and the fans inside Carver Arena went wild as it appeared that the preseason player of the year had just won a dogfight for the Braves.
Unfortunately, few things have come easy for Bradley this season.
Deen and Braves fans inside the arena didn’t know that head coach Brian Wardle called a timeout before the would-be go-ahead three.
“I know his heart was in the right place,” Deen said about Wardle calling the timeout. “Quan [Jaquan Johnson] is the one who called it. You know we have to call timeouts; coach can’t call them. Quan apologized, and then he [Wardle] apologized. But it was cool, though. I really wasn’t tripping. I knew he’d draw something up and get something good.”
Deen was right about his coach. Wardle drew up a great play.
After the timeout, Bradley came out in 1-4 flat. Senior Darius Hannah set a screen, flashed at the top of the key and received the ball. Hannah tried to initiate a dribble handoff with Deen, but he was not open, so he faked it, drove to the rim and finished the game-winning layup.
Carver Arena exploded into cheers as they celebrated the 85-83 win.
“It was just another late game set that we work[ed] on,” Hannah said. “We just executed it. They didn’t want Duke shooting, so I faked the hand-off and got a layup. I tried to dunk it, but I slipped.”
The Braves escaped the game with a win, but it was not easy. The matchup was a marathon, and Bradley narrowly crossed the finish line first.
Brave fans give the team courage
The team started the game down 12-0.
In the opening minutes, the Braves surrendered three open threes and turned the ball over three times, which disrupted their offensive flow.
Bradley did not play like a team coming off a bad loss to its biggest rival or a team that would be playing for its season in St. Louis in less than two weeks.
Wardle called a timeout after the third three, less than three minutes into the game.
The Racers extended their lead to 14 shortly after, but the Braves got on the board on a layup from sophomore forward Almar Atlason.
It was a start, but the Braves were still missing shots and turning the ball over.
Then something extraordinary happened.
Near 13:00, Wardle signaled to the crowd, waving his arms like a madman to get the hometown crowd into the game.
It worked, and the crowd began to cheer for Bradley despite the Braves giving them little reason to beforehand.
“Sometimes, as a coach, you feel your team needs something,” Wardle said. “When we’re at home, we need our crowd. Not during the good times. In the good times, they’re rolling. It’s during the tough times. We were struggling, and they responded. They stood up, got my bench going, and got my players going, and we started playing better right after that.”
Bradley got a stop on defense on the possession that Wardle signaled to the crowd. On the next possession, senior guard Zek Montgomery knocked down a three.
Johnson bullies the Racers
The crowd went wild after the three from Montgomery, and the momentum swung in Bradley’s favor. The team began to play with much more life defensively and forced the Racers into tough shots.
The Braves took care of the ball offensively, allowing them to enter their sets. Bradley used penetration and quick ball movement to collapse the Racers’ defense and get open looks at shots.
After Atlason’s opening bucket, the Braves went on a 27-7 run spanning 11 minutes and took a 29-21 lead.
Freshman Jaquan Johnson headlined the run. The 5-foot-11-inch guard scored or assisted on 17 of the 27 points in Bradley’s comeback.
Johnson’s numbers were excellent in the first half, but even gaudy stats don’t encapsulate his effect on the game. Every time the Braves needed a big play, “Bully,” as his teammates call him, was there to convert an and-one, take a charge or knock down a three.
Freshmen are rarely as good as Johnson in the Missouri Valley Conference, but Johnson’s teammates aren’t surprised.
Johnson and Hannah are both Milwaukee natives and come from a tough, physical and scrappy basketball town.
“Bully,” Hannah said. “That’s who he is. That’s who his background is. That’s where he comes from. If you go back and watch his [Pius XI Catholic High School] highlights, you’ll see even more.”
“No disrespect to Pius, but he was their only player out there,” Deen added. “He was dropping like 30-point triple-doubles literally a couple of months ago. He’s just carrying it over to the next level. We just give him confidence. We give him the wheel, and he goes out there and does what he does.”
A game of runs
After the Braves counterpunch, the Racers delivered a jab of their own, going on a 9-2 run to take a 31-29 lead.
The teams traded buckets for a few possessions until Murray State went on another 6-0 run to close the half, leading 39-36 at the break.
The end of the first half and the beginning of the second were similar. Bradley struggled to defend the three-point line, was careless with the ball and couldn’t knock down shots even though they created good looks.
From the 1:34 mark in the first half to the 14:41 mark in the second, Murray State went on a 20-4 run and took a 56-40 lead.
The Duke restores order
Amid Bradley’s comeback and Johnson’s play, Deen had struggled.
In the first half, Deen was one-for-six from the field with one assist, one turnover and three fouls. Because Johnson played well in the first half and Deen was in foul trouble, Wardle decided to start Deen on the bench in the second half.
He entered the game with 16 minutes to play and made every minute count.
The senior came off the bench scorching hot and made four threes in a row. He outscored the Racers 17-11 in just six minutes and led the Braves on a 25-11 run to cut their deficit to two.
“It’s just a will, bro,” Deen said. “I just really don’t like losing. I don’t think anyone in that locker room likes losing. They were telling me I needed to step up. If I can do that, and if it’s in my will to do it and God’s will, then I’ll do it. This is another testament to the work as well because I don’t think anyone [is] gonna be able to take them shots if they don’t put the work in.”
After Deen brought Bradley back, both teams battled down the stretch of regulation and overtime. The Braves and Racers made big plays, but Bradley made a few more.
“I’ve been in thousands of them as a player and a coach,” Wardle said about high-intensity games. “It’s a game of runs. It’s a game of momentum. I kept telling them in the huddles to settle in. You just stay level-headed in the huddles. You keep talking about what you need to do to win and trust your players. You have to trust your players that they’re going to make plays as the game goes on and they did.”
“I just told the team to fight, that’s about it,” Deen added. “Keep fighting, keep clawing away. They were up 16 with a lot of time left. I had a respectable worry, a respectable fear, but I was still confident that we would trim this lead down, bit by bit, second by second, and make it close and try to get this W.”
With Arch Madness approaching in less than two weeks, Bradley needed to be tested in a game like this because the road is not getting easier in the future.
“Every game is going to be like that,” Deen said about Arch Madness. “Every game you play or watch will be like that. It gives you a look. That’s what every game will look like from here on out. We’re literally 12 days away.”
The Braves have two more regular-season games before going to St. Louis. Bradley faces Valparaiso first at 8 p.m. on Wednesday.
