SLIAC Tournament Begins with Familiar Foe for Red Devils

EUREKA – On Tuesday at 7 p.m., the Eureka men's basketball team will take on Principia for the third time in the past nine days.

Last Monday, the Red Devils went to Elsah and handed the Panthers a 96-79 loss in the first meeting between the two teams this season.

Then, on Saturday, the maroon and gold hosted Principia and pulled off another incredible comeback victory in a season peppered with them. Neither team will soon forget how it went down: The Red Devils clawed their way back from down 14 points to force overtime after senior point guard Jalen Hosea hit the game-tying 3-pointer near the buzzer, then got the edge in OT, 84-81.

Now, Round 3 between the two squads is a win-or-go home St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Tournament quarterfinal game.

"It's new for college athletes to play each other this much in this short amount of time, but it kind of feels like a series with them," 15th-year EC men's basketball coach Chip Wilde said. "Any time that you have something interesting that happens like that, I think that it sparks energy or motivation … I think that it's going to be cool."

The Red Devils (14-11, 10-4 SLIAC) are the second seed in the tournament and Principia (9-14, 5-9 SLIAC) is the seventh, but this weekend's results – both at the Reagan Athletic Complex and elsewhere in the conference – have shown that there isn't much room between any team in the league.

Last week alone, the second-seeded Red Devils lost to eighth-seeded Greenville. Westminster knocked off third-seeded Blackburn and top-seeded Fontbonne to go from seventh in the league to fourth. Sixth-seeded Webster topped third-seeded Blackburn, and eighth-seeded Greenville edged fifth-seeded Spalding.

Aside from the 1-vs.-8 matchup, it wasn't clear how the tournament field would be seeded until after all but one game had been played.

"I think that when we looked at the conference as a staff, we were all in agreement that there were pretty good teams from top-to-bottom," Wilde said. "We thought it was truer than ever that anybody could beat anybody on any given night, and I think still holds true for Tuesday night."

The Red Devils have become well aware of the level of play Principia can reach when things are going its way, as it was during most of the first half on Saturday.

The Panthers are averaging 74.9 points per game and leading the league in field-goal (47.7) and 3-point percentage (37.3). They are also in the top three in the league in assists with 18.2 per game.

Their leading scorer is junior guard AJ Bryd, who tallied a game-high 22 points at the Reagan last Saturday, and is averaging 16.1 points per game on the season – good for fifth in the SLIAC. Clark Davidson, one of two 6-foot-5 big men for the Panthers, follows with 14.4 points per game, along with a team-high 8.1 boards per game. He posted 20 and six on Saturday on 7-of-11 shooting.

Junior guard Jake Kampf hit a pair of 3s and added eight points, but he currently leads the SLIAC in 3-point shooting, hitting 45.3 percent from distance. Sophomore Shemarri Miles is averaging 8.2 points per game and leads the team at 3.8 assists per game. 

On the season, Principia is second to last in the league in rebounding, with 33.8 per game; however, on Saturday against EC, the Panthers pulled down 48, the third-most boards in a game that they have all year.

After the first half, the Red Devils were getting outrebounded by the Panthers by 11, but Eureka came back strong after halftime and tallied 27 to the visitors' 20 the rest of the way.

"I think we just keep learning more about ourselves, and all the things that have to work on," Wilde said on the question of what the team has learned from the Principia games. "Really, they haven't been that different, whether it's been Principia or the other six teams in our conference, or in non-conference. We've kind of been working on the same three or four keys since November."

As always, it will come down to the right combination of defense, rebounding and offensive efficiency.

Eureka leads the league with a 1.032 offensive efficiency and is fourth in the league in defensive field goal percentage (43.5 percent).

The Red Devils are second in the league in scoring (83.6 points per game), field-goal percentage (46 percent) and 3-point percentage (35 percent), and they lead the league in free-throw percentage (74 percent).

On the season, the team has three of the SLIAC's top five scorers.  Senior Ian Milsteadt is averaging a league-high 18 points per game and is collecting 5.9 rebounds per game. He racked up a team-high 29 points in the first Principia matchup and finished with 17 on an off shooting day on Saturday. Milsteadt is 15 points away from becoming the 26th player in program history to reach 1,000 as a Red Devil.

With 16.3 points per game, junior big man Logan Dorethy ranks third in the SLIAC while pulling down 6.2 rebounds per game and shooting 56 percent from the field (fourth in the SLIAC). A transfer from Hannibal LaGrange, Dorethy has come alive on the offensive end for the Red Devils in conference play this season.

Junior Charlie McKinty emerged as one of the league's best scorers after playing more of a supporting role in his first season as a Red Devil last spring. He is fourth in the SLIAC in scoring at 16.2 points per game and is tied with senior J'Len Crawford for most 3-pointers this season.

Crawford adds 11.3 points per game and is fifth in the SLIAC with seven boards per game. It was his offensive rebound in the waning moments of regulation on Saturday that kept Eureka's Senior Day hopes alive.

Hosea – the one who delivered the triple that sent the Reagan into a frenzy on Saturday – leads the SLIAC in assist-to-turnover ratio at 3.1. He is third in the SLIAC in total assists, distributing 100 dimes in 24 games.

Saturday's win marked the eighth time the Red Devils have notched 10 wins in SLIAC play under Wilde and the fourth consecutive time when playing the traditional round robin schedule. It is the program's fifth consecutive top-three finish and third top-two finish in the last five seasons despite a COVID interruption last season.

 "I was just happy for our players on Saturday," Wilde said. "I thought it was great that the play that sent it into overtime were two seniors – an offensive rebound and kickout by a senior and a made 3 by a senior. I thought our other seniors had a good day, too, and I just hope that momentum carries over to Tuesday night."