Danny Stewart had 18 points and 10 rebounds in win over Penn. Gregg Slaboda Photo.

LAWRENCEVILLE — Anthony Myles may not have started the game, but he finished it with a bang.

The senior guard drained a 3-pointer with 26.1 seconds remaining and Rider erased a 14-point second-half deficit to end 2013 in style with an 89-88 victory over Penn Sunday afternoon at Alumni Gymnasium.


“To be honest,” Myles said, “when it left my hands, I felt it.”

That shot was enough for the Broncs (6-5) to overcome a sizzling shooting performance by the visiting Quakers. Penn connected on 69.2 percent in the second half (59.6 percent for the game), building a lead as large as 14 with 7:34 left.

Afterward, the word resilient was tossed around a lot to describe the effort.

“Seven minutes and we look on the court with four other guys with me and we’re like, ‘we got this, we got to stay together,’” senior Danny Stewart said. “We have to get one stop at a time. I think by us coming together it doesn’t matter what deficit we were down as long as we kept playing hard and kept trying to get a stop and a score at the same time.”

That’s exactly what Rider did.

The Broncs managed five consecutive stops to end the game with Stewart poking the ball away from Fran Dougherty as he looked to drive to the basket on Penn’s final possession.

“We just had to buckle down,” Stewart said. “We needed one more stop. I knew they were going to go to him. He was going to go hard right and I cut that off and then he spun and was loose with the ball so I poked it out.”

Stewart finished with 18 points and 10 rebounds, including four straight free throws that pulled Rider within 88-86 with two minutes remaining.

The Broncs finished with five players in double figures. Myles, who didn’t start the game for disciplinary reasons, scored 16 while Khalil Thomas had a career-high 14, Tommy Pereira added 12 and Zedric Sadler 10.

Justin Harrell paced the Quakers (2-8) with a career-high 23, Miles Jackson-Cartwright finished with 20 and Dougherty had 18.

Dougherty scored 16 of his 18 in the second half to help Penn build its double-digit lead. The Quakers outscored the Broncs in the paint 40-20.

Trailing 88-86 after a pair of Stewart free throws with two minutes left, Rider forced Penn into a shot-clock violation but turned the ball over when Jimmie Taylor carelessly dribbled it off his foot.

That prompted coach Kevin Baggett to smash his fists against the scorer’s table in frustration.

His team, though, made another crucial defensive stop when Greg Louis bricked a 3-pointer. Baggett called timeout and ran a play for Myles to come off a staggered screen.

“He told me if I see light, shoot it,” Myles said. “That’s what I did.”

“I trust the fact that Anthony can make those shots,” said Baggett, adding that’s why he went for the lead instead of a tie. “He does it everyday in practice and he does it in the game. He had some open looks today and I’m like, ‘you got to make those,’ and again I trust him.”

Taylor missed three straight free throws that could have iced the game and Baggett instructed him to miss a fourth on purpose with 1.4 seconds remaining so Penn couldn’t run an inbounds play. Taylor clanked the fourth and the Quakers never got a shot away.

Baggett said the ending of the St. Peter’s/Seton Hall game earlier this year influenced his decision when St. Peter’s didn’t miss on purpose and Seton Hall sent the game to overtime with a half-court shot.

“I knew if we were in this situation, we better miss it,” the coach said.

Rider used a 17-4 run over the final 5:47 to take a 37-36 lead into halftime. Pereria and Thomas combined for 15 of the final 17 points as the Broncs’ guards — Myles, Sadler and Taylor — struggled through a 3 for 15 half.

Penn went inside to Dougherty to start the second half and he scored 11 points in the first 3:44 of action, helping the Quakers to a nine-point advantage.

Rider won the battle on the glass 43-26, including 21 offensive boards that led to 28 second-chance points.

“I thought our guys were pretty resilient,” Baggett said. “We battled back throughout the game.”