The SIU men’s basketball team won an 89-85 nailbiter against the University of Illinois Chicago on Jan. 25 for their fourth win in their last five games.
Damien Mayo made what head coach Scott Nagy called “the play of the game.” With 44 seconds left and the Dawgs down 82-80, Mayo saved a ball from going out of bounds and threw it off a UIC player, which meant the Salukis kept possession. After the inbound play, a Kennard Davis Jr. layup and free throw made the score 83-82 and gave the Salukis a lead they’d hold for the rest of the game.
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Davis Jr., Dibba and Jarrett Hensley went a perfect 7-7 from the free throw line to help ice the game in the last 40 seconds. Hensley, who finished with 11 points, went 4-4 in that series and 6-8 from the line for the game.
“To be down there, under two minutes to go, and kids fight back… as many things as our kids have been through, it would have been easy, down, to kind of just cave it in and they didn’t,” Nagy said.
The Salukis, led by Ali Dibba’s 26 points, went blow-for-blow with the Flames, and neither team led by more than 8 points.
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Nagy went deeper onto his bench for the matchup with the Flames, partially due to some foul trouble for Hensley and Drew Steffe; Sheridan Sharp played 18 minutes, Davion Sykes 21, and Jorge Moreno saw his heaviest minutes of the season, seeing 17 minutes of action off the bench.
“I thought Jorge, so proud of him tonight, the way that he played… A lot of good contributions that people may not even talk about,” Nagy said.
Davis Jr. shot a scorching 75% from the field, going 8-12 en route to 19 points.
He wasn’t the only sharp-shooter for the Dawgs; the team as a whole shot 55% from the floor despite only shooting 28.6% from 3-point range. Moreno was an efficient 3-4 from the field, and Sykes was 2-2.
“We played fast, we had a better pace to us, which I really like much better,” Nagy said.
The Salukis, who scored the first points of the game, had a slow start to the game, and UIC jumped out to an 11-4 lead in the first four minutes. SIU finally retook the lead at the eight-minute mark, and went into halftime knotted up 46-46.
SIU built up to a 6-point lead around the 15-minute mark, but UIC quickly cut the gap and held the Salukis scoreless for nearly three minutes before eventually taking the lead at the 9:50 mark.
UIC again retook the lead, 77-75, with 3:38 to go, and would keep it or be tied with the Dawgs until Davis Jr.’s and-one.
The Salukis, who have won four of five and now sit at 9-12, including 4-6 in the Missouri Valley Conference, will take the court again on Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 7 p.m. in a road matchup with the Valparaiso Beacons.
Sports reporter Ryan Grieser can be reached at [email protected]. To stay up to date on all your southern Illinois news, be sure to follow The Daily Egyptian on Facebook.
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