Everyone dreams about the start of college basketball season but in two of the last three years, those dreams haven’t always ended pleasantly for Bradley.
That wasn’t the case on Monday at Carver Arena, where the Braves took home a wire-to-wire 93-59 victory over Division II member Wisconsin-Parkside to start the 2022-23 season.
Bradley suffered season-opening losses to Saint Joseph’s in 2019 and South Dakota State in 2021, and both were the only losses to start a season the Braves have had in the Brian Wardle era. Their head coach didn’t have to do much to avoid a similar outcome this time around as the Braves’ play on the court took care of business.
“I thought we executed well,” Wardle said. “This is a game of execution; it’s a game of mistakes. Whoever makes the least amount of mistakes usually wins and I thought we made the least amount of mistakes and took care of the basketball.”
The Braves only turned the ball over once in the first nine minutes of action and committed just seven turnovers overall. Monday’s game marked the first time that Bradley gave the ball away less than eight times since January 17, 2021.
Free throws have also been an Achilles’ heel for the Braves in recent memory, but the team made good on them by going 20 of 27 from the charity stripe on the night.
The frequent trips to the foul line started early on, with forwards Darius Hannah and Ja’Shon Henry attacking the post repeatedly in the first half. The latter converted a pair of free throws to finish off a personal 6-0 run that cushioned Bradley’s lead to 18-9 with 14:08 left to go in the first half. Henry finished with a team-high 19 points and made all of his seven shots from the field to go with a perfect 5 for 5 mark at the line.
“I think that’s where I can really succeed,” the senior said about his role after playing 17 minutes off the bench. “Our team has a lot of depth. I can start or I can come off the bench, it doesn’t really matter.”
Hannah, who started in place of an injured Rienk Mast, wowed the crowd with multiple alley-oops throughout the night. The most important of the bunch came from sophomore guard Connor Hickman with just over four minutes left to play in the first half, as it halted an 8-0 run from the Rangers.
“I have to step up and play a bigger role, but still play my role and do what I can do to help the team win,” Hannah said.
The junior forward posed matchup problems all night long for the much smaller Wisconsin-Parkside and kept the visitors guessing by scoring via post ups, off the dribble or cutting to the basket for the aforementioned alley-oops. He finished with a career-high 16 points and a team-leading seven rebounds in 21 minutes.
“Darius has been making plays off the dribble,” Wardle said. “He’s a problem in our offense because we have shooters. He’s earned [the starting spot] and he was in the rotation before Rienk got hurt.”
After Bradley’s lead was diminished to single digits in the waning minutes of the first half, the Braves responded in the last media timeout before the intermission with a flourish. Hickman hit a layup followed by a 3-pointer to give the Braves a 45-28 lead at the half.
“We huddled up in a timeout and we all, just as a collective group, went like ‘Alright, let’s try and put this away… let’s try to get to our execution details on the offensive and defensive scheme’,” Henry said. “I think that’s [what] we did and we ended the half really good.”
“This team talks well with each other,” Wardle added. “There’s more player accountability now and we’re more player-led at this point of the season than we were last year for sure.”
Hickman added three more points early in the second half to give Bradley its then-largest lead of the game at 51-32. Shortly after, the Braves went on a 12-0 scoring run in a span of just over three minutes to put the game out of reach midway through the second half.
Wisconsin-Parkside’s Colin O’Rourke ended the drought with a 3-pointer, but Bradley’s D-II foe struggled to establish momentum after halftime. The Rangers’ leading scorer Jamir Simpson, who finished with 16 points and eight rebounds, was held scoreless after the 18:39 mark of the second half.
The Braves converted their opponent’s 16 turnovers into 30 points compared to the Rangers’ five points off of seven Bradley turnovers. Many of those turnovers led to fast break opportunities for the Braves, who seemed to enjoy playing at an uptempo pace both in their exhibition win against Illinois Wesleyan and on Monday night. Bradley outscored Wisconsin-Parkside on fast break points 19-3.
With the large lead, Bradley was in no hurry in the second half. Many possessions featured more than a handful of passes and helped lead the team to a 50 percent mark from beyond the arc, more than double Wisconsin-Parkside’s 3-point success rate.
“I love seeing that we guarded the three-point line pretty well again,” Wardle said. “That’ll be a huge key moving forward.”
Hickman and senior Ville Tahvanainen both sank a trio of 3-pointers and chipped in 14 and 11 points, respectively, for the Braves. Bradley’s next contest will take them to Logan, Utah to face the Utah State Aggies, a team that earned an NIT berth last season.
“This is just one game and we’ve got an extremely tough schedule ahead of us,” Wardle said.
