Southeast Missouri State men's basketball team falls to host SIUE

EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. -- Southeast Missouri State senior guard Jarekious Bradley stood outside the Redhawks locker room at the Vadalabene Center, a towel covering his head and a look of disbelief on his face.

Southeast had rapidly erased a 13-point first-half deficit before the SIU Edwardsville Cougars clawed their way back by dismantling the Redhawks defense midway through the second half.

SIUE made a late push and held on for a 75-72 victory, clinching a spot in the Ohio Valley Conference tournament.

Southeast dropped to 12-15 and 6-8 in the conference. The Redhawks sit in eighth place in the standings.

"It was a tough one. You've got to have games like this, close games like this," Bradley said, shaking his head. "I don't know. We've got to have games like this. We can't let games like this slip away."

SIUE held a 30-17 advantage with 3 minutes, 35 seconds remaining before the break after consecutive 3s from Kris Davis and Jake Newton.

Southeast junior guard Isiah Jones answered with 13 unanswered points of his own. His first points of the game came on a pair of free throws with 3:29 remaining in the half. He followed that up with a three 3s and a transition layup to knot it at 30-30 with 1:46 left.

"Seeing my two free throws go in, that's all I needed was the ball to go in," Jones said. "Second half it started out the same way. I couldn't buy a shot at the beginning, but then I see the first one go in and I started making them. I was missing layups, easy putbacks -- it's just a mind thing."

After an SIUE basket, Bradley rattled off four more points to complete Southeast's 17-2 run that gave it a 34-32 halftime lead.

"I thought our guys lost their composure for the last 3 minutes and 50 seconds of the first half," SIUE coach Lennox Forrester said. "Jones and Bradley kind of went to work against us. They were making shots. I didn't think that we guarded them very well. We lost track of them."

The Redhawks pushed their lead to nine when a layup by freshman guard Marcus Wallace with 13:05 remaining made it 51-42.

The Cougars used a 7-0 run to cut it to two, and eventually took a 57-55 lead with 7:24 remaining on a layup by senior forward Keaton Jackson.

"We felt like we played great the whole game," Jones said. "Towards the middle of the second half we just let down on defense and like every possession they were scoring. We've just got to have pride on defense, including me. I need to be the leader on the defensive end. It seemed like they was kind of trying to pick on me in the middle of the second half. I was moving a little slow on defense."

Southeast tied it at 59 with 4:58 remaining and trailed by just three points at the final media timeout with 3:21 left before SIUE used another 7-0 spurt to extend the lead to 70-61 with 51 seconds left.

"They were picking on one or two guys, and I felt like they really went at Isiah Jones, they really went at Antonius Cleveland, and that's just a matter of bowing up and being tough and saying, 'Hey, no more. You're not getting anymore. You're not going to drive on me anymore,'" Nutt said. "Right now Nino Johnson is our rim protector and he's the leading shot blocker in the league, but had no blocks tonight. So that tells you a little bit that maybe we were a half step slow defensively, and that's the thing that was discouraging because I felt that we prepared well, we had our game plan well."

Jones sank a 3-pointer from the left wing with 22 seconds left to cut it to five, and after Davis split free throws at the other end, Jones hit his fifth of the game from the same spot to cut it to 73-70 with 15 seconds remaining. He and Bradley finished with a game-high 21 points.

A dunk by senior forward Nino Johnson cut it to two after a free throw by the Cougars, and after Davis hit one with seven seconds left Bradley had one last heave to send the game to overtime that was off the mark.

"You don't have a lot of time in that situation with no timeouts," Nutt said. "The plan was to get a screen at half court, which it was. They switched that, and they got it to JB, and JB took a tough shot -- probably a 30-footer. If he could have got closer to the 3-point line it have been different, but that wasn't the difference."

Nutt said the difference was his team's second-half defense. The Cougars (11-14, 7-7 OVC) shot 60.7 percent in the second half, but missed all five of its three point attempts in the final 20 minutes.

"It was more of our guys were trying to be aggressive," Forrester said. "The thing with SEMO -- they have length and they have height and they have a good shot-blocker in Nino Johnson. I think he's probably No. 1 in the school history as far as blocking shots. But again though, we didn't want to just be settling for jump shots but try to get to the lane and let them stop us a little bit."

Davis finished with 15 points to lead SIUE while Jackson and Nunn had 13 and 12, respectively.

The Redhawks remain on the road and face Eastern Illinois (15-12, 8-6 OVC) at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday in Charleston, Illinois.

"It's going to make us even angrier and ready to play these next two games," Jones said.