City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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As one final timeout had the Drexel and Delaware squads at their respective benches with only seconds left in the Philadelphia edition of their biannual rivalry game, the public address system blared a song that’s become ubiquitous in the City of Brotherly Love over the last month: Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares,” the unofficial anthem of the Philadelphia Eagles’ Super Bowl victory.

It was a fitting song to play at the time, considering how the evening was playing out.

For Drexel, it was a dream; for Delaware, it was a nightmare.

The Dragons looked dead in the water over the opening 15 minutes against a Blue Hens squad that could not miss, then pulled off the largest comeback in Division I history, storming from down 34 points to take home an 85-83 win at the Daskalakis Athletic Center on Thursday night.

No team in Division I basketball history had ever come back from a bigger deficit to come away with a win. The previous record of 32 points was set back in 1950, when Duke pulled it off against Tulane.

“We have a lot of guys who pride themselves on being tough, we say tough all the time, but you’ve got to go out there and prove it,” redshirt junior guard Tramaine Isabell said. “We’ve had games where we didn’t prove it, and we’ve had games where we did prove it. At the end of the day, you always have the option to show what you’re made of, and I think we just did that.”

Isabell, the Missouri transfer who’s been brilliant for large stretches of an up-and-down season for Drexel (12-18, 6-11), came one assist away from being the first Dragon with a triple-double in 15 years, finishing with 29 points, 12 rebounds and nine assists against just one turnover.

He also accounted for the game-winning points, hitting two of three free-throw attempts after getting fouled on a deep attempts from the left wing with 2.2 seconds to play.

“I feel like I wanted to take them to the basket and Austin Williams was going to come up and set a screen,” Isabell said, “(but) too much time had gone by, so I decided I was going to pull up and he fouled me. I would never say he didn’t -- we won the game.”

It was the height of improbability that the Dragons would have even been in that place to begin with.

Delaware (12-18, 5-12) had its highest-scoring half of the season over the opening 20 minutes, hitting 10 3-pointers to go up as many as 53-19 with 2:36 left in the half. At the midway point, the lead was down to 27, still a formidable gap for a Dragons squad that had lost its last four games in a row.

But Drexel chipped away bit-by-bit, slowly getting back into the game. With 15 minutes left, the gap was down to 21; five minutes later it was just 11, though it remained at double-digits under the final five minutes of action.

“We just said hey, forget the scoreboard right now, let’s play to what we need to be about, let’s play to what Drexel basketball is about and is definitely going to be about even more long-term,” Spiker said. “You could feel the momentum [shift], the game is playing with momentum and we were on the fortunate side tonight.”

The comeback effort was helped out tremendously by a full-court pressure defense which forced eight of 12 Delaware turnovers in the second half, including three in a 35-second span with about five minutes left which really swung the arrow in Drexel’s favor.

Sammy Mojica (16 points) and Troy Harper (14 points) combined on one impressive turnover, with both making out-of-bounds saves on a steal that resulted in an Isabell triple that cut the gap to 77-73 with 4:55 to play.

“It’s kind of funny because before the game I wrote on the board, I wrote ‘hungry dogs run faster,’” Harper said.

“That was you?” Spiker interjected.

“Yeah,” the Neumann-Goretti product and redshirt junior continued. “At halftime, I kept looking at that, and I was just thinking the whole second half, just play hard and try to outrun everybody. That’s what it was, I got the tip and outran whoever it was to the baseline and just saved it.”

A 3-pointer by Kurk Lee Jr. (12 points) and then 3-point play by Isabell tied it at 79 with 3:50 left; Isabell put Drexel up by two for the first time all night two minutes later.

Delaware had two game-tying buckets in the final 90 seconds, including one by Ryan Daly to tie it up with 10 seconds to play. But that left Drexel plenty of time to get a shot off -- or get fouled, as it were.

At the end of the evening, Drexel was happy to get the win -- even if the Dragons weren’t thrilled about the way it had to happen.

“It’s not the best record to break,” Harper said with a laugh. “Yeah, it’s a great feeling that we’ve done it, but nobody wants to every do that again. It was fun, but nobody wants to go down 30 and have to fight back and win.”

At least now, they know it’s possible.