Everybody in UD Arena — the Flyers’ sideline, the sold-out crowd of 13,407, the Davidson bench — knew what was coming.
Brea — the 6-foot-6 junior guard out of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan — leads the nation in three-point field goal accuracy, making 49.1 percent of his shots (78 of 159) from beyond the arc.
He’s the first sub head coach Anthony Grant sends in every game, and he brings with him a sense of anticipation and excitement if you are a Flyers’ fan, a feeling of dread if you are not.
It doesn’t take him long to take a three and in the first half of every home game, his favorite launch pad is on the wing, as close to the opposing team’s bench as he can get.,
“The funniest thing is always hearing the other coach in my ear, telling the person guarding me: ‘Get closer! Get closer! Don’t let him get a shot!’ Brea said. “But somehow, they manage to mess it up and it’s fun to see their coach’s reaction.”
He didn’t have long to wait Tuesday night.
Just 56 seconds after he entered the game, he set up in front of the Davidson bench, got a pass from Kobe Elvis and let fly with a net-snapping trey.
“There’s always some chirping,” he said of the opposing bench players. “But if you hit a couple, they get pretty quiet after that.”
This time reality set in quickly for the Wildcats and their reactions made for the game within the game.
With 7:52 left in the half — after having missed a three on the Flyers’ last possession — Brea got the ball right back on the wing.
In the Red Scare section, one student reveler waved a placard that simply had an orange and yellow flame on it. That’s for “Fuego” and a nod to Brea’s Dominican roots and his nickname since high school.
En Fuego — On Fire.
And Brea was just that when he got the ball back with a chance to erase his last misfire.
Davidson’s head coach Matt McKillop, who wore a nice suit and a sudden scowl, knew what was about to happen and quickly turned and walked toward midcourt, not bothering to watch Brea promptly bury his second three.
A couple of minutes later Brea got the ball again and this time a Wildcats’ bench player held up his hands as if playing defense, a move that was just as ineffective as Davidson forward Riccardo Ghedini rushing too late at the Dayton sharpshooter, who made his third trey.
Brea’s final three of the half came at the 2:06 mark and this time the only reaction was Davidson’s assistant coach Joshua Heyliger burying his face in one of his hands.
Brea made 4 of his 6 three-point attempts in the first half and finished with a 5-for-9 effort from long range for a team-leading 17 point effort in the Flyers’ 80-66 victory.
The No. 21 Flyers are 22-5 with three games left in the regular season.
Six players scored in double figures Tuesday night, but no one put on a show like Brea.
It’s like that many games and the reaction on the Davidson bench was no different than it’s been with many other teams.
“Against George Washington this year, I’d just checked into the game and my first play was off an inbounds pass,” Brea said with a smile.
“Everybody on their bench was saying” ‘The play is for Brea. Don’t let him shoot! Don’t let Brea shoot!’
“I was right in front of them, and I just laughed and said ‘Watch this!’
“The ball was inbounded, I came off…and… I hit the three. I just looked back at them, and they said ‘ah…shucks.’”
Shucks?
Brea just grinned at his paraphrasing.
He said there have been other times where opponents have tried elbows instead of expletives.
“Yeah, intimidation has been part of some teams game plan,” he shrugged. “One game, when I didn’t expect it, I got an elbow to the stomach. That made me realize some teams are gonna come fot me, so I got to be ready.”
That’s led to some exuberance on his part and in the Fordham game he got a technical after he buried a trey in front of the “chirping” Rams bench, quickly turned and made a gunslinger motion at them before trotting down the court.
“I learned my lesson,” he said with a smile Tuesday night.
As for the reaction of his coaches, he said: “They trust me. They know I’m one of the veterans, but they gave me one of those looks, like ‘C’mon you know better than that!’
“But I know they respect what I do for the team, and they know it takes some emotion.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Finding confidence
When he was a freshman at Norman Thomas High School on E. 33rd Street in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, Brea remembers staring at a sheet posted on the wall after basketball tryouts and not finding his name.
He’d been cut and it crushed him.
It was the first time he’d ever been so rejected.
“I always liked shooting the ball and when I was real small, I’d shoot from as far out as I could,” he said. “I couldn’t reach the rim, but I just kept trying and trying.”
He said older players at the competitive New York parks encouraged him and his early shooting idols were guys like JJ Reddick and Kyle Korver
“But once (Steph) Curry came into the league, that changed everything for me,” he said. “I wanted to shoot the ball like him.”
As a middle schooler he was one of the taller players and he said coaches wanted to make him the team’s center, but he balked. He wanted to shoot from the wing.
After he was cut, his dad, Stephan Brea — who had played professionally in his native Dominican Republic — took him to Dwayne Mitchell, who led the program at Monsignor Scanlan High School in the Bronx.
“(Coach Mitchell) told me, ‘Listen, you’re gonna be good. I gotcha now,’” Brea once told me.
He said they worked out daily at the Gauchos Gym in the Bronx: “I became a different player. I got a different skill set but more importantly, I had confidence.”
He played JV as a sophomore at Monsignor Scanlan and moved to varsity as a junior: “My very first varsity game, we played a nationally-ranked team that had R.J. Davis (now at North Carolina) and A.J. Griffin (Duke/Atlanta Hawks.) I was scared, but I kinda lit it up.”
Brea became a prep star and eventually chose UD over teams like St. John’s, Seton Hall and Illinois, in part because of the connection he felt to UD assistant coach Ricardo Greer, who is also of Dominican descent, came from Washington Heights, played professionally in the D.R, and knows Brea’s godfather, fellow Dominican Felipe Lopez, who starred at St. Johns and played in the NBA.
Brea has played in 107 games at UD, more than any other player on this year’s team. He’s scored 809 points in his career and is one of just eight players in UD history to have made at least 200 three pointers.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Thankful to be on the court
After Tuesday’s postgame press conference, UD president Eric Spina waited for Brea in the hallway and congratulated him.
He told him he was proud of him.
Brea has overcome a lot just to even play this season.
Last April he underwent surgery on both of his lower legs to try to relieve stress fractures that had hampered him all last season. He’d been unable to play in the summer and preseason of 2022 and missed six of the first seven games last season. By the end of the year, he was hobbled.
Rods were inserted in both of his tibias.
To better explain the process, he took out his phone and said:
“Here, I can show you.”
He pulled up a photo of an X-ray that showed the rods running the length of his lower legs, each piece of hardware connected to the bone by three screws.
“It was a hard process,” he said. “I was laid up for five months and there definitely was a time where I didn’t know how this would end up going.
“When you’re so in the moment and you’re not able to walk and need so much help, you think, ‘Man, how is this gonna be for me at the end?’ You second guess yourself a lot.
“But at the end of the day I had a good team around me — good trainers and doctors — and surprisingly I don’t even feel (the rods) now.
“All that’s why this year is just so much sweeter for me. I can hardly put into words how good it feels.
“It’s not just the success I’m having individually or our team’s success, but just the fact that I’m able to play the game I love. I’m just so thankful I can be out there on the court.”
Everyone in UD Arena agrees ... except the opposing benches.
And that’s why one Davidson assistant coach could do nothing Tuesday night but bury his face in his hand.
Credit: David Jablonski
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