Saluki men’s basketball (15-5, 7-2) maintained its Valley lead in a Tuesday night contest with the Evansville Purple Aces (4-16, 0-9), defeating the 12th-ranked team 78-70. While the score ended close, the Salukis lead for the entire game and held a double-digit advantage for most of the night.

Marcus Domask almost matched a career-high in points 31 on the night, boosted by a 20-point second-half performance. His 12-for-17 shooting provided nearly half of his team’s total made shots.

“I think my teammates have got a lot of awareness on who’s kinda feeling it on a certain night, whether it’s Lance, me, X, Jawaun, whoever,” Domask said. “I think we do a good job kinda feeding and playing off each other.”

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The Salukis got off to a hot start. They lead 16-1 just five minutes in, and lead by as much as 20. Playing in the Banterra Center on the first day of the spring semester, the team was able to play to the crowd with dunks and other highlight plays throughout the first half.

However, the offense eventually ran out of steam, and Evansville managed to battle back with a 13-2 run just before halftime to keep the game within reach.

“I thought we got a little relaxed, to be honest,” Domask said. “I felt like we almost were trying to make a play to get the crowd going a little bit, and just try to do a little special stuff that we don’t usually do. I thought we kinda played out of ourselves.”

While the Purple Aces rarely got within single-digits, they still proved to be a tough out for the Salukis; especially considering SIU had beaten Evansville by 27 in their Nov. 30 meeting.

Notably, the Salukis turned the ball over 13 times in the second half, compared to just five turnovers in the first 20 minutes. Their 18 total turnovers is the most since Dec. 10 against Alcorn State.

“The turnovers is what we haven’t really done really post-Christmas that we did a lot tonight,” head coach Bryan Mullins said.

Some other standouts on Tuesday included JD Muila, whose 10 rebounds included five on the offensive side, and Troy D’Amico, who broke into double-figures for the first time this season with 10 points.

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“The past couple games, I’ve been building confidence,” D’Amico said. “I feel like I’ve been playing better, shooting the ball better.”

Jawaun Newton had perhaps one of his best games in a Saluki uniform. In just his second game as a starter, Newton dropped 11 points and grabbed five rebounds against his former team.

“I thought Jawaun played pretty hard defensively,” Mullins said. “Offensively, he played downhill, took good shots.”

Although Evansville’s comeback attempt was unsuccessful, it still showed that Southern has plenty to work on as it moves forward in Valley play.

“You can always learn from winning,” Mullins said. “You can be upset that we didn’t play the way that we need to play to get to where we want to go to with this team. We’ve got to play better.”

The Salukis entered Tuesday night in a three-way tie for first place with Belmont and Indiana State. One game behind them was a five-way tie at 5-3, creating a logjam in such a competitive league.

Southern’s next task is a road game against Missouri State (9-9, 5-3), one of the teams in the logjam behind SIU, on Saturday. Then, the Salukis will return home on Jan. 24 to face Murray State (10-8, 5-3), which they defeated on the road a few weeks ago.

With such a slim lead and with so many team still in the mix, every single game matters. Even though it wasn’t pretty towards the end, the Salukis can learn lessons from this game while still celebrating a win in the always-tough Missouri Valley Conference.

“Any time you can get a win and get a game where you can learn a lot from it is big for us,” Domask said.

Staff reporter Brandyn Wilcoxen can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @BrandynWilcoxen.

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