The Tuesday night contest was tight with 7:07 left in the second half. The Braves led 59-58 over Drake, but then the referees hit junior Nate Kennell with a technical foul for protesting a non-call.
Nearly one minute later, Bradley’s bench received a second technical for arguing a foul called on senior guard Dwanye Lautier-Ogunleye.
The Braves found themselves down three with six minutes to go.
The two technicals gave Drake the chance to build a lead of seven, 70-63. The Bulldogs kept the lead during a scoring drought for both teams in the last three minutes. After exchanging buckets, a Drake dunk put the Bulldogs up five with 13 seconds to go.
Junior guard Darrell Brown tried to cut the lead to three but missed a layup and committed a quick foul to send Drake to the free throw line. Bradley lost 77-68, the biggest lead of the night for Drake.
“The two technical fouls weren’t at a great time either at all for us,” Bradley head coach Brian Wardle said in an interview with WMBD’s Dave Snell. “We just need to get smarter. We can’t get so frustrated.”
There was only a nine-point difference in the final score. The difference of made free throws tallied between the two teams: 25.
Drake attempted 36 free throws, hitting 31. Bradley only attempted nine free throws and made six, committing 21 personal fouls and two technical fouls. Bradley struggled to convert necessary shots, only making one of their last seven field goals in the last four minutes.
“They made big shots,” Wardle said. “We did not, but we had our best players shooting [those shots]. People like Darrell [Brown] have been making those shots all year, so we like what we did, but you can’t overcome the free throw discrepancy. You can’t.”
Brown scored only nine points, the lowest amount since he scored one point in Bradley’s loss at Missouri State January 26. He struggled with fouls and shot 3-for-13. Both Brown and senior Luqman Lundy picked up two fouls in the first half and finished the game with four fouls apeice.
“We put ourselves in position down the stretch to find a way to win this game, but the bottom line is that it’s hard to overcome the free throws,” Wardle said. “We were battling foul trouble all game, shuffling the lineups, and Darrell couldn’t get going because he picked up two fouls early in the game.”
Sophomore Elijah Childs and senior Dwayne Lautier-Ogunleye kept the Braves in the game and were the only ones to score over 10 points for the team. Childs recorded a career-high 24 points on 11-16 shooting along with nine rebounds. Lautier-Ogunleye followed up Childs’ performance with 13 points, 10 rebounds and three assists.
Bradley and Drake went back and forth throughout the majority of the game. Drake went up six at halftime with a buzzer-beating layup, but neither team could extend a lead of six until the end of the game.
In contrast to Bradley’s shooting woes, five Drake players finished with 10 or more points. Senior Brady Ellingson led the team with 17 points.
Drake now sits atop the Missouri Valley Conference with a record of 10-5. Bradley drops to a fifth-seed (7-8) and will play Evansville at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Carver Arena.
