Eureka Tops Blackburn, Improves to 3-0 in SLIAC, 77-69
CARLINVILLE, Ill. – The Eureka men's basketball team is 3-0 in St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference play after weathering a late push by Blackburn on the road on Wednesday.
The Red Devils held on for a 77-69 victory to knock off the two-time SLIAC Tournament champions.
Senior forward Charlie McKinty (Elmwood, Ill./Elmwood/Illinois College) posted a season-high and game-high 18 points on 5-for-8 shooting. He hit a pair of 3s, went 6-for-6 from the free-throw line and had five boards and four assists.
Junior big man Cody Baer (Peoria, Ill./Dunlap/Southwestern Illinois) and junior guard Noah Persich (Peoria, Ill./Metamora/Parkland) each followed with 14 points. Baer was an efficient 6-for-8 from the field and added four rebounds, two blocks, one assist and one steal.
Persich hit a pair of triples, distributed five assists and tallied three rebounds and a steal. One of the Red Devils' primary ball-handlers, he didn't commit a single turnover in 34 minutes.
Fellow guard Austyn Ellison (Hudson, Ill./Bloomington Central Catholic) notched nine points while dishing a team-high seven assists and grabbing six boards.
Logan Dorethy (Hamilton, Ill./West Hancock/Hannibal LaGrange) gathered a team-high nine rebounds, scored eight points, had an assist and contributed a huge block late in the game. Peewee Brown (Peoria, Ill./Manual/Lincoln) added eight points, four assists and three rebounds, and Andrew Gonzalez (Mundelein, Ill./Mundelein) recorded six points, four rebounds, two steals and an assist. He hit back-to-back treys in the first half and had one particularly consequential board late in the game.
Eureka controlled the first half, but the team started to achieve separation in the last six minutes before the break.
An 11-0 run gave the Red Devils their first double-digit lead of the game with 2:06 left in the half. Gonzalez's first 3 made it 32-22, and when Blackburn's Troy Cole Jr. answered with a triple on the other end, Gonzalez canned another one to make it a 10-point lead again.
The maroon and gold would have gone into the break with a 10-point advantage, but a last-second foul call and a pair of free throws made it 37-29 after 20 minutes.
The lead hovered between 6-10 points for the first eight minutes of the half until back-to-back buckets by Ellison extended it to 13 and prompted a Blackburn timeout with 11:40 left.
The home team got it back down to single digits, but back-to-back scores by Brown extended the lead to 15 with 8:47 left, causing the Beavers to regroup again.
The lead would swell to 18 following a 3 by Persich with 7:44 left. Then, Blackburn started to recover and work its way back into the game.
The Beavers hit three 3s during an 11-0 run that brought them within five points with less than two minutes left.
When the Red Devils needed a big basket to stop the run, Persich made a heads-up dish inside to Dorethy to give the visitors a seven-point cushion.
Blackburn's Chanz Aldridge responded with a 3 to make it a five-point game with 1:11 remaining. It ended up being as close the Beavers would come the rest of the way.
On the next possession, Eureka got late in the shot clock before the ball went out of bounds and the team called timeout. With two seconds left, the Red Devils in-bounded to Baer, who got a shot off in time, and Gonzalez came up with the crucial rebound, forcing the home team to foul.
Persich and Baer each made a pair of free throws to stretch the lead back out to nine. Blackburn's Cameron Johnson hit one more 3 with six seconds left, but the game was in hand by then.
Cole finished with a game-high 19 points, a team-high eight rebounds and three of his team's eight 3s. Aldridge ended up with 18 points on 8-of-20 shooting after being held to two points in the first half.
Eureka shot 44.6 percent from the field and made 12-of-15 free-throw attempts. Blackburn recorded a comparable 41.5 field-goal percentage, but the Beavers struggled from the line, going 7-for-13 on the night.
The Red Devils only turned the ball over 10 times to Blackburn's 15, and they recorded 17 points off turnovers. Their total of 23 assists is second on the season only to the 29 against Greenville.
Eureka has now bested the Beavers in four of the last five meetings and leads the all-time series, 25-9.
They're now one of only two unbeaten teams in SLIAC play; Webster is the other one.
The Red Devils (5-9, 3-0 SLIAC) will look to stay undefeated in conference play on Saturday when Spalding (1-11, 0-2 SLIAC comes to town for a 3 p.m. showdown inside Christine Bonati Bollwinkle Arena and Convocation Center.