Leading by three with 17 seconds to play, there was one thing Bradley’s players didn’t want to have on their mind.
Overtime.
In their first match of the season against the Indiana State Sycamores on Dec. 18, the Braves were ahead by three with just one second to play when a miracle three-point shot sent the game to overtime.
While Bradley would eventually come out victorious in that game, it took not one or two, but three overtime periods to decide a winner.
That was a scenario the Braves wanted to avoid at all costs.
“No, not again,” graduate guard Alex Huibregtse and sophomore guard Jaquan Johnson each said on the prospect of going to an extra period. “We don’t need three overtimes again.”
With Indiana State needing to push the ball down the court, they tried to force a pass up the floor. But instead of the pass finding a blue jersey, the ball wound up in the hands of forward AJ Smith, who was fouled and sent to the line for two free throws.
The senior found himself in a familiar spot. In the first match between these teams in Terre Haute, Smith missed a free throw that would’ve sealed the game in regulation right before the game-tying basket. Once again, he was at the line with Bradley up three and a chance to put the game away.
This time, things were different. Smith remained composed at the line and knocked down both shots to build the Braves’ lead to five, effectively icing the eventual 75-68 win.
The win was not pretty for Bradley by any means. While the final score may imply the game was a tightly contested battle the whole way through, it was arguably the Braves’ ugliest yet most resilient win of the season.
Grit over glamour
The first matchup between the Braves and Sycamores saw fireworks early, as Huibregtse caught fire to help build an early 17-3 lead before Indiana State came roaring back in the thriller.
Those same fireworks were not present in the first half of the return game, as both sides struggled to get going offensively.
“We’re trying to change our offense a little bit, so I feel like we’re trying to get in a groove with that,” Johnson said. “I feel like once we get into the groove, guys will get to see the way the other guy guards, and that’ll definitely help us.”
Bradley’s shooting went cold early, as the team went 12-for-33 from the field in the first half, while the Sycamores went 14-for-25.
“They switched more than we expected,” head coach Brian Wardle said. “They’re always pretty physical to get through screens and jumping screens. They’re always pretty physical on cutters, but they switched a lot more than we thought they would, and there were some adjustments in our ball screen coverage at halftime.”
While Indiana State led in seemingly every metric at halftime, one issue kept Bradley in the game.
They couldn’t stop turning the ball over.
The Sycamores gave up 10 turnovers in the first half, while the Braves only had three. The second half was much of the same, as Indiana State gave the ball away nine times while Bradley didn’t turn the ball over once.
The Braves also completely flipped the rebounds in their favor in the second half, as they entered the break trailing in that battle 19-14 before outrebounding the Sycamores 22-15 in the final period.
“Win the rebounding war, turnover war and free throw war, you’re going to win 95 percent of your games no matter how you shoot the ball,” Wardle said. “We’ve won in all different ways, whether it’s points in the paint, free throw line, threes, perimeter jumpers, we’ve kind of done a little bit of every way, and we’ve also lost a lot of different ways too. That’s what you have when you have a young team.”
Bradley trailed 60-52 with 9:12 to play in the game before embarking on a 7-0 run across a minute and a half to cut the deficit to one. The run was capped off after Johnson, who ranks second in the nation in steals, forced a turnover and got the ball to freshman Matthew Zobrist, who finished the layup in a game where he saw his most action yet in conference play.
“He was disciplined defensively, he was going onto the handoffs that we wanted him to,” Wardle said on Zobrist’s performance. “It’s the little things that win. He’s going to be a big-time scorer at Bradley one day; there’s no doubt in my mind. But his role as a freshman is not really that right now, so he’s got to buckle down and do the little things in his minutes, and I thought he did that well for us today.”
As soon as they gained the momentum, however, the Braves seemingly lost it again. Just a minute and a half after Zobrist’s layup, Bradley once again found themselves down by eight after Hunter Harding threw down a dunk with 6:17 to play.
From there, though, it was all Braves. The Sycamores couldn’t buy a bucket as the Bradley defense held the line through the comeback and finished the game on a 15-0 run.
“We knew that both of the teams wanted this one really bad,” Johnson said. “We knew that we needed this win to compete for the top spots in the Valley right now, because we need one of those spots. So we came into this game with an edge, knowing we can come out with a dub.”
It was a much-needed win for the Braves coming off a blowout loss to Illinois State over the weekend. With Murray State’s loss to Drake, Bradley remains in third place and finds itself a game and a half behind the top seed in the Missouri Valley Conference.
“I told the team before the game, and it’s an old phrase I heard a long time ago: Through loss, stay strong; it’s a learning opportunity,” Wardle said. “You’ve got to learn and let that anger and chip on your shoulder motivate you to keep working hard. And that’s what we’ve always done in this program. We take no one for granted, and we know we have to keep getting better; we’re not there.”
The Braves’ next test will come on Saturday at 7 p.m., when they host red-hot Illinois-Chicago. The Flames will enter the contest looking to build on a five-game win streak, while Bradley will look to add to what is now a nine-game win streak at home.
