Strong defensive performance fuels win for Southeast men's basketball team

Southeast Missouri State men's basketball coach Dickey Nutt said he was pretty confident that his past teams would've lost a close contest against Southeastern Louisiana on Saturday, especially because the Redhawks weren't having great success offensively.

He was also confident in this year's team after the Redhawks sneaked out of the Show Me Center with a 63-59 win against the Lions (2-7).

"I was really proud of the guys, the way they played and the hustle and the determination they had," Nutt said. "This was a grind-out game. In the past this is a game that we would've dropped. If you shoot 38 percent from the field, a lot of time you're not going to have much success, but our defense kept us in tonight."

Southeast held a 36-24 advantage at halftime before SLU steadily chipped away at the lead.

The Redhawks' defense held the Lions to 40.8 percent shooting on the night, but they were 12 of 21 overall and 4 of 7 from behind the arc (both 57.1 percent) in the second half.

Meanwhile Southeast shot 31.3 percent after halftime and made just 5 of 25 3-point attempts in the game.

"We had a tough time scoring the basketball," Nutt said. "I thought, and I told our team afterwards, that we settled way too much. I mean, I don't know when the last time we shot 25 3s. That's not us. We try to share the ball, get better shots, get the ball inside a little bit more than what we did. I thought we became stagnant against their zone and didn't play quite as well. I give them credit for mixing up their defenses and kind of stalled us."

SLU scored the first five points of the second half, including a 3 by Daniel Grieves with 18:30 remaining to trim Southeast's lead to seven.

After Joshua Filmore connected on a 3 with 16:02 left to make it 43-35, Southeast never held a double-digit lead again.

Filmore was fouled on a 3 and made all three free throws and knocked down another with 3:29 to play that pulled the Lions within two points at 59-57.

"We've just got to locate shooters in transition and not make games harder than they have to be down the stretch," Southeast sophomore guard Antonius Cleveland said.

"We kind of lost some shooters in transition and they hit a couple 3s," Cleveland added. "It is basketball, but there's something that we can do to prevent that, so we've just got to work on transition defense."

Southeast extended its lead back to four after senior guard JJ Thompson came up with a steal that led to a dunk by Cleveland.

SLU answered with a layup by Zay Jackson with 1:43 left, but that was the last points Southeast allowed.

The Redhawks had two chances to extend their lead, but senior guard Jarekious Bradley and Cleveland each missed the front end of a one-and-one in the final 30 seconds.

Cleveland's miss came with four seconds left, but senior forward Aaron Adeoye, who finished with 14 of Southeast's 50 rebounds, snagged it and held on for a jump ball in the Redhawks' favor. Southeast outrebounded SLU 50-28.

"I thought our rebounding was fantastic," Nutt said, noting that 50 rebounds is "music to a coach's ears." "I thought Aaron Adeoye was outstanding tonight. Fourteen rebounds -- he played with just that unselfish attitude. Didn't score it particularly well, but he just said, 'To heck with that, I'm going to get every rebound.' None could've been bigger then that last rebound under our basket that we were able to get a nice inbounds play to our best free-throw shooter."

Bradley caught that inbounds pass with 2.8 seconds on the clock and knocked down both free throws to seal the win.

"We made our free throws down the stretch, finally," Bradley said with a grin on his face.

The Redhawks finished 10 of 15 from the line (66.7 percent). They're shooting 61.0 percent from the line on the season and were coming off a 5-of-14 free-throw shooting performance at Missouri.

"I think the biggest thing is that we don't react," Nutt said when asked about the two one-and-one misses late. "I tell my staff, 'Never duck your head. Never, ever duck your head to our team, to that floor.' We want to encourage, we want to clap and say, 'We're going to get the next one' because it's a mental thing. You can sit there and try to tell him, 'Hey, get it up, get it up, give it a chance.' That's all bologna. At this level you can shoot it or you can't. It didn't phase us one bit. Obviously something goes through my mind when he misses, but again our defense is what we're relying on and we did a good job defensively, so we were just counting on that and then JB hits the two most important free throws to put that game out of reach."

Bradley led Southeast with 21 points. Cleveland finished with 12 points, eight rebounds, four assists, two blocks and two steals while Thompson had 11 points, five rebounds, two assists and a steal. Senior forward Nino Johnson, who Nutt said was under the weather, had nine points and nine rebounds.

The Lions were paced by Grieves with 14 points. Center DeVonte Upson and Jackson, their leading scorer entering the game, had 10 and 12 points, respectively.

Southeast (4-4) hosts Southern Illinois on Wednesday and Missouri State on Saturday at the Show Me Center.

"I told our team that our league is very similar to that team," Nutt said of SLU. "Now, we certainly have much better teams in our league, but for the most part every team has one or two really, really fine players. They had two really, really special players. We did a real good job following our game plan and really doing a good job of keeping them under check. Holding them to 12 points and 10 points is huge for us because they're capable of getting 18. I mean, they scored 57 points against Tennessee Tech in one half, so they're very capable of scoring the basketball. But defensively is where we really came to life tonight."