Millikin Gets Edge over Red Devils, 60-58

EUREKA – The Eureka men's basketball team went down to the wire against Millikin on Thursday and came up just short.

The Big Blue held off the Red Devils for a 60-58 win at Christine Bonati Bollwinkle Arena and Convocation Center.

Eureka's Austyn Ellison (Hudson, Ill./Bloomington Central Catholic) scored a team-high 22 points on 9-of-20 shooting from the field and 3-of-7 shooting from beyond the arc. He also had three assists and four rebounds.

Logan Dorethy (Hamilton, Ill./West Hancock/Hannibal-LaGrange) added 14 points and eight rebounds. Cody Baer (Peoria, Ill./Dunlap/Southwestern Illinois) followed with eight points and four rebounds while battling foul trouble. Andrew Gonazalez (Mundelein, Ill./Mundelein) pulled down eight boards in 22 minutes off the bench.

Millikin big man Frazier Ott led the Big Blue with a team-high 14 points and nine rebounds in 21 minutes off the bench. Guards Noah Livingston and JT Welch added 13 and 12 points, respectively.

Eureka spent a good portion of the game trying to close a small gap.

The Red Devils led early but trailed by seven midway through the first half.

A three-point play by Dorethy gave the home team a one-point edge with less than five minutes until halftime, and two Eureka steals and buckets later, the Red Devils led by four.

Millikin, however, recovered, closing the half on a 9-2 run that made it 25-23 at the break.  

The Big Blue maintained a slim lead until a major 3-pointer by Ellison knotted the game at 50-50 with 3:35 to play.

When the visitors extended the lead back to six with 1:22 left, Ben Carter (Morton, Ill./Morton) and Ellison hit 3s on back-to-back possessions.

In between the big shots, though, Frazier slipped to the basket for a dunk off a feed by Demarcus Bond to keep Eureka from tying it up again.

With 13.5 seconds left, the Red Devils fouled to stop the clock and Millikin's Drake Stevenson made 1 of 2 to make it 59-56.

Eureka called timeout and got a good look on the next possession. Ellison received the ball from Noah Persich (Peoria, Ill./Metamora/Parkland College) on the elbow, curled around a Gonzalez screen and went up in the air with two defenders in his face. Mid-air, he turned and found Gonzalez on the right elbow. Gonzalez got a shot off with less than five seconds remaining, but it bounced off the rim and the backboard. Persich followed it and tipped it back in to make it a one-point game, but there were only 1.1 seconds left on the clock.

It was only enough time to send Millikin to the line for the last time, and Livingston made 1 of 2 free throws to end it.

Eureka (1-3) will look to bounce back against Rockford (2-0) on the road on Saturday at 7 p.m.