UNI men’s basketball tops Southern Illinois, moves into first place in Valley

CEDAR FALLS — AJ Green and formidable defense pushed Northern Iowa past Southern Illinois at McLeod Center Wednesday night, 53-44.

Clinging to a 44-41 lead with less than four minutes to play, Green hit his fourth 3-pointer of the game to extend UNI’s lead to six. Lance Jones — who led SIU with 13 points — answered with a 3 of his own, but a pair of play calls outside the Panthers’ flow offense led to Green’s first career dunk and two Noah Carter free throws that effectively ended the Salukis’ hopes of an upset.

“I’ve been waiting for it. All year,” Green said of his dunk. “It absolutely was (a grind) tonight. We knew they were going to slow the game down a little bit (or) try to. The last timeout we knew we had two or three sets we wanted to go to there. One of them was that play I got the dunk on.”

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Despite a 17-5 lead to begin the game and the Salukis failing to reach double digits until Steven Verplancken’s 3 with 2:35 remaining in the half, UNI led just 26-19 at halftime.

After the break SIU (12-13, 5-8) continued its methodical climb back into the game, going on a 10-0 run, punctuated by Trent Brown’s 3 for a 36-35 lead with 10:18 remaining.

“We really benefited from great defensive effort and them missing shots,” UNI coach Ben Jacobson said. “We didn’t take advantage of it, so at halftime you’ve got a ballgame. (Coach Bryan Mullins’) team (is) not going to change the way they play. They’re not all the sudden just start coming down and chucking (up) shots. Sometimes teams will do that when things aren’t going great. So that allowed them to cut into that (lead).”

A 9-2 run by UNI (14-9, 10-3) immediately followed the Salukis’ outburst. Green, Bowen Born and Trae Berhow each got downhill against SIU’s league-leading defense and Berhow sparked the Panthers down the stretch with a driving dunk for a 44-39 lead.

“They’re jumping at me for the 3s and Noah has been talking a lot of trash to me lately about me not dunking it,” Berhow said. “He didn’t like that one in the Bradley game where I didn’t dunk in transition, so ever since then I’ve been pretty much trying to dunk everything I can try to.”

Green led all scorers with 24 points on 7-of-14 shooting. No other Panthers reached double figures, but Berhow added seven points and 11 rebounds while Born scored eight off the bench.

UNI travels to Chicago Sunday for a 3 p.m. tipoff at Gentile Arena against Loyola Chicago (ESPN2).

The Ramblers (18-5, 9-3) — who were upset 68-61 Wednesday at Bradley — enter Sunday’s matchup in second place, a half-game behind the Panthers in the Missouri Valley Conference standings.

“I’ve talked with the guys about it over the last probably 10 days, two weeks — every time we walk out there right now it’s a big game,” Jacobson said. “So, we’ve put ourselves in position to have that same type of preparation and same type of feeling when we walk out there on Sunday.”