Once again, déjà vu set in for Bradley men’s basketball on Sunday.
In their final regular season game, Bradley’s patented slow start reared its ugly head, and the Braves fell to Drake 74-67 at the Knapp Center in Des Moines.
The Braves went into halftime with a 14-point deficit against the No. 2 team in the Valley, spearheaded by a 17-2 run the Bulldogs built heading into the locker room. Twenty-one days prior, Bradley trailed by 11 against last year’s Arch Madness champions after one half in Peoria and the end result was almost the exact same, even down to the Braves’ comeback that fell just short.
It’s the sixth time Bradley’s been in a double-digit halftime hole this year, making Sunday a fitting conclusion to a regular season filled with tumultuous starts.
“It hurts, it kills us,” head coach Brian Wardle said. “You can’t have a bad five minutes, six minutes against good teams. You just can’t.”
Bradley (21-10, 13-7 MVC) shot better than the Bulldogs (25-6, 16-4 MVC) throughout the game, including a 68% mark from the field in the second half. However, with double the amount of turnovers that Drake had, the Braves could never find their footing as Drake went 25-26 from the free throw line.
The other problem for the Braves was a familiar one: Tucker DeVries.
Following a 22-point performance the last time the two teams faced off on Feb. 10, DeVries put up 29 in this one, with 23 coming in the first half. The reigning MVC Player of the Year scored the first 14 points of the game for the Bulldogs, going on a 10-0 run by himself after Bradley took an initial 9-2 lead.
Bradley tried to stop DeVries by putting reigning Defensive Player of the Year Malevy Leons on him, but there’s a reason the Drake junior is in the running for back-to-back Larry Bird trophies.
“I let him go in the beginning, let him hit some shots,” Leons said. “That’s when he’s really hard to stop – when he sees a few open looks and sees a few going in. I gotta be better on that and don’t let him get a huge first half like he did today.”
Still, Leons caused problems for DeVries throughout the game, with three of his four blocks coming on the Valley’s second-leading scorer. Bradley held DeVries to just six points in the second half, with much of that being the cause of Leons and the rest of the team’s pressure.
“My teammates helped me out in the second half, guarding him,” Leons said. “We started to switch more, stuff like that.”
“He’s an NBA player,” Wardle said. “He’s gonna make shots, he had a tremendous first half. I think we did a little better on him in the second half, maybe wore him down a little bit but we gotta do a much better job competing against him in the first half and challenge him a little bit more.”
Leons led the Braves with 18 points, with seniors Duke Deen and Darius Hannah tallying double figures as well. Beyond that, minus an effective appearance from senior Connor Linke locking down Drake big man Darnell Brodie, Wardle wasn’t impressed with his team’s output.
“We just didn’t have enough guys play well tonight. Pretty much only Malevy did,” Wardle said. “We had guys playing over 20 minutes not producing. And we gotta put up some numbers and produce and that’s what it’s going to take to beat teams in March.”
With a potential rematch against Drake on tap in the semifinals of Arch Madness, everyone on the team knows they can’t have starts like Sunday if they want to compete.
“We just gotta show up, that’s about it,” Deen said. “Obviously, we could’ve won, but it just didn’t turn out like that. When we get to St. Louis we just gotta have a different mindset, a different gear.”
DeVries’ early-game run didn’t deter the Braves from hanging with the Bulldogs, as they traded shots and took a 27-26 lead off a Leons jumper with 4:57 to go in the first half.
That was the last field goal Bradley made in the period.
Drake’s 17-2 run gave them a 43-29 lead at halftime, marking a familiar sight for a Bradley team that trailed 41-30 against the Bulldogs in Peoria.
“I thought we lost the game the last five minutes of the first half,” Wardle said. “Defensively, very poor. Not enough ball pressure, turnovers hurt us all game. Our turnovers were live ball turnovers, I thought that really, really hurt us and gave them runs.”
Much like that Feb. 10 game, the Braves started to charge up during the second half. Bradley did a lot more driving and cutting to the basket, scoring easy layups and mid-range jumpers to bring the deficit down to eight with 13:53 to go and forcing a Drake timeout. According to Deen, the Braves’ strategy was to keep things moving coming out of the locker room.
“Just moving without the ball,” Deen said. “If they’re just gonna keep denying us and stuff, just move without the ball [and] hoop a little bit.”
An 8-0 Drake run doubled the home team’s lead, but Bradley’s defense locked in to force an over five-minute field goal drought for the Bulldogs and bring the deficit to 10. Less than three minutes later, a Deen three cut that lead in half, and all of a sudden the Braves were in a two-possession game.
Bradley brought the lead down to as little as four with 2:17 to go, but two turnovers and a missed layup down the stretch prevented them from getting over the hump, and Drake iced the game with free throws.
“It felt like every time we were on a run we either took a bad shot or we turned the ball over,” Wardle said.
The Braves’ propensity to always come back has helped them stay in games until the very end, as only one of their six double-digit halftime deficits resulted in a double-digit loss. That experience dealing with adversity will be helpful at Arch Madness, but it ultimately doesn’t mean much if they can’t turn it into a win.
“We know we can [make comebacks]. I think we’re just trying to focus on staying in the game, getting the lead and not giving it up,” Deen said. “Once we take a lead on a team, about five or more points, it’s hard to come back on us. But we know we can come back if we’re down so if we just take the lead I feel like we’ll be fine.”
Bradley opens the MVC Tournament on Friday at 8:30 p.m. against the winner of UIC and Southern Illinois, two teams the Braves beat twice this season. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, however, and Wardle knows it.
“We got our hands full Friday night. The tournament is one game at a time and Friday night’s the hardest one,” Wardle said. “The first one is always hard.”
If they get past Friday, they’ll play the winner of Drake and either Evansville or Illinois State, giving the Braves the chance to finally get past the Bulldogs, get their revenge on the Aces or beat their rivals for a third time this year. But if Bradley’s going to do that, they need the whole team to play to their potential.
“We just need consistent play from everyone,” Wardle said. “It doesn’t mean you have to play great, or good, just average and that’s enough for us. We have that talent, but we can’t have guys playing poor and multiple guys not bringing it on both ends of the floor.”
After heading into last season’s tournament with a 12-game winning streak, this year looks a little different for Wardle’s squad, and he hopes Sunday’s loss will make them more ready than ever.
“We should be hungry,” Wardle said. “We just came off a tough loss where a lot of guys did not play well, and so hopefully that gives us a chip on our shoulder and keeps us extra motivated.”
It’s win or go home at this point, and the Braves’ new season starts on Friday.
“We just gotta know that this is the level we’re gonna face every game from now on, and we gotta understand that there’s no next game from now on,” Leons said. “We’re gonna play for one more game every time we step on the court.”
