How Bradley basketball completed the largest comeback in program history

The bus trip from Carbondale to Peoria is approximately four hours, and Bradley’s Duke Deen didn’t want the ride back home to be a somber one.

That scenario looked likely early Wednesday night when the Braves trailed Southern Illinois by 23 early in the second half and struggled to find a rhythm.

But thanks to a renewed defensive effort, a few clutch shots and even more heart, the Bradley men's basketball team pulled off the biggest comeback in program history and left the Banterra Center with a 70-69 victory, the team’s seventh consecutive win.

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“It's a 40-minute game, and you're gonna have to play 40 minutes I think to beat us this year," Bradley coach Brian Wardle said. “We've shown in previous games [that] we're going to fight, we're going to compete and then that competitive spirit came out and we just chipped away, chipped away and chipped away.”

The 23-point comeback is five larger than the previous record, set when Bradley defeated Northern Iowa in the 2019 Missouri Valley Conference tournament final. BU also erased an 18-point deficit vs. Tulsa in 1996.

Bradley (13-5, 5-2) now sits in third place in the MVC, one game behind co-leaders Drake and Indiana State. BU returns to the court Saturday with a 1 p.m. home game against Belmont.

How Bradley finished off the rally

Graduate forward Malevy Leons and the Braves gradually climbed back into the game by shooting 70 percent from the floor in the second half, eventually tying it up at 65 with 2:26 to go.

“I felt like we were on the ropes and we could do nothing but fight our way back and go punch for punch and try to find a way to get back into the game,” Leons said. “And once I kept looking at the score, I kept seeing us getting closer and closer and big play after big play just got us back into the game.”

Junior guard Connor Hickman started “Hickmania” at the perfect time, sinking a corner 3-pointer to force the tie, then giving Bradley a 70-67 lead with 59 ticks left with an old-fashioned three-point play.

BOX SCORE: Bradley 70, Southern Illinois 69

Feeling a hot streak, his layup attempt to put the Braves up by three with 19 seconds left was no good, but following an SIU timeout, the reigning MVC Defensive Player of the Year Leons forced the Salukis’ Xavier Johnson to miss the potential game-winning shot on the final possession.

The Braves bench stormed the floor in celebration.

“We played to win, we did not play not to lose, that's for sure,” Wardle said. “I love how our guys competed and made big plays. A lot of things got to go right when you're down that much but the fight, the heart. flying around the floor, playing for each other was there.”

'Everyone responded'

Every player that saw the floor for the Braves on Wednesday night had a role in the win.

Bradley’s group of forwards got the ball rolling in the second half by getting to the hoop, as Darius Hannah finished a three-point play, Leons and Almar Atlason made pairs of free throws, and an alley-oop from Deen to Kyle Thomas cut the deficit to 50-33 with 15:36 left.

“You challenge a couple guys, you talk over a few plays, we went with Kyle Thomas and I thought he gave us a good lift,” Wardle said. “I thought [Demarion] Burch was really good in the second half, Almar was better …everyone responded for us and that was big.”

Leons hit the first of two huge second-half treys before freshman spark plug Burch didn’t shy away from contact and went on a personal 5-0 run after getting fouled twice. The Braves were halfway there, down 54-43 with a shade over 12 minutes to go.

“The start of the second half, we won the first four minutes,” Deen said. “We try to chip away like that, we do it in practice situations so we just try to win every four minutes between every timeout and just keep chipping away.”

Then it was Hickman’s turn to come alive, as he got the rim for a pair of layups that were part of an 18-6 run from the Braves after being down 20 just five minutes earlier.

“I knew where we were in control when we got it to 10," Deen said. "They just started like you know, they started playing a little tight and a little tense; playing to not lose."

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The Salukis continued to drain out the shot clock to try and eliminate a Bradley rally. They ran into an inspired defense that held them to 35 percent shooting and just one 3-pointer in the second half.

SIU's Johnson, the nation’s second-leading scorer at 23.8 points per game, scored a team-high 12 in the first half but was limited to just two field goals in the second half thanks to a stellar shutdown effort from Hickman and an adjustment by Bradley to switch defenders on screens.

Inspired at halftime

Hickman and Leons ratcheted up the intensity after a halftime pep talk from Wardle.

“It was a lot of challenging guys [in halftime], Malevy and I especially got challenged [because] we weren't very good in the first half so we had to pick up what we were doing,” Hickman said. “Duke and Darius were solid the whole game but we needed to help them out.”

SIU’s star guard made just one shot down the stretch, a jumper to put the Salukis up 65-54 with 7:22 remaining. From then on, a more free-flowing Bradley offense saw Leons sink a 3-pointer after grabbing an offensive rebound over three Salukis, Hickman laying one in, and then blocking a shot by Johnson that led to a gutsy, off-balance deep ball from Deen in transition.

Two possessions later, Leons stole one away from Johnson, passed it to Deen, who dished to Hickman in the corner to tie the game at 65 and cap off an 11-point Bradley run with 2:26 left.

He, Deen and Hannah all tied for team-high scoring honors with 15. Deen finished with a team-high six assists while Hannah was responsible for three blocks and two steals.

“[Hickman] in the second half was that all-Valley player that he's been," Wardle said. "I thought he was tremendous in the second half on both ends."

The Salukis’ only field goal in the last seven minutes of the game came on a layup from AJ Ferguson that put the hosts up 67-65 momentarily. But a layup from Deen high off the glass and Hickman’s 3-point play sealed the win, which the Braves only had an 0.8 percent chance of doing after they went down by 23 early in the second half, according to ESPN analytics.

After Thomas’ dunk early in the second, the Braves made 15 of their last 19 shots. SIU faltered by making just one of their final eight attempts and Bradley played almost perfect with just two second-half turnovers.

“You don't have a lot of room for error when you're down 21 at the half, you got to come together as a team and execute and almost play 90 to 95 percent flawless," Wardle said, "and I would say we probably did that."

This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Bradley Braves basketball rallies to come back vs. Southern Illinois