Back in March, Milwaukee helped Cleveland State win the 2023-24 Horizon League regular season championship outright, as the Panthers stunned Green Bay in their final scheduled contest, while CSU watched and celebrated on the home bench at the Wolstein Center immediately following a victory over Northern Kentucky.
On Sunday, the Vikings learned that the Cream City sword is double-edged and always unsheathed, as UWM very nearly pulled off a second massive upset in the space of five conference games, forcing CSU to rally from a 59-49 deficit entering the fourth quarter for a 73-68 overtime victory. The comeback allowed the Vikings to improve to 12-2 overall, and 4-0 in conference play.
The ingredients to Cleveland State’s victory, perhaps the least probable of the Vikings’ 29 consecutive home wins, weren’t hard to locate.
First and foremost, CSU limited the Panthers to just nine points during the fourth quarter and overtime, a must, given a frequently-misfiring offense that saw leading scorer Mickayla Perdue limited to 5-for-23 shooting, including 0-for-9 from three-point range. As a team, the Vikings were 4-for-21 from behind the arc and didn’t hit a single three-pointer after Destiny Leo’s buzzer-beater at the end of the first quarter.
Conversely, Milwaukee was 10-for-23 from three-point range after 30 minutes, with Jada Donaldson (4-for-6), Anna Lutz (3-for-5), and Sagamore Hills, OH native Hallie Majoros (2-for-4) standing out as particularly lethal. Lutz (20 points) and Donaldson (19) wound up as the Panthers’ leading scorers for the contest, largely on the strength of those bombs.
During the game’s final 15 minutes, UWM went just 1-for-10 from deep.
“I don’t think we made too many perimeter mistakes,” Vikings head coach Chris Kielsmeier said. “I don’t think the three balls were wide open, which they were early in the game. It just comes down to executing better.”
“Our perimeter rotation is going to get us beat, if we don’t figure it out,” he continued. “Obviously, they hit 11 threes, but the big category for me is that they shot 33. You can’t shoot 33 threes against us when our defense is firing the way it’s supposed to. We’ve still got a lot of things to get better with, and if we don’t, we’re gonna get beat.”
CSU’s starting post player, Jordana Reisma, was vital to the shutdown as well, as she helped limit Panthers frontcourt standouts Lutz and Jorey Buwalda to 1-for-12 shooting following the third intermission, after the duo began 11-for-18.
Reisma also factored heavily in a re-tooled offensive effort. Early foul trouble limited her to eight minutes in the first half (and zero points, as she missed her only field goal attempt), but she once again became the clear focal point of the Vikings’ attack in the third quarter on the way to a 17-point, 10-rebound effort, along with a game-high plus-12 rating.
“At halftime, the group really got together and said ‘hey, we need to regroup here, we need to focus, and do a lot better than we did in the first half,” the Milwaukee-area product said. “In the second half, I think we really stuck together a lot more.”
“They doubled Jay really hard all game, especially early in the game,” Kielsmeier added. “I’ve been on her, and all of the post players, saying that you’ve gotta show that you can evolve when the hard double comes. Because it’s coming.”
Between the persistent efforts to get the ball to Reisma, and a concurrent plan to have Perdue drive the middle of the floor, where she managed to draw seven fouls and go 11-for-12 at the charity stripe on the way to a team-best 21 points, the Vikings managed to steadily chip away at the deficit. They finally pulled level for the first time since early in the second quarter on a Reisma free throw with 22 seconds remaining in regulation.
“We executed some really good sets down the stretch that were kind of counters to what they were thinking we were doing, and players really have to be able to adjust in the moment,” Kielsmeier said. “I thought the players were really locked in with me: ‘Here’s what I’m seeing and what I want, go do it.’”
After Perdue missed a potential winner at the fourth quarter buzzer, Reisma took over during the extra period. She singlehandedly gave Cleveland State a five-point lead in the final two minutes that would hold up the rest of the way, thanks to a slick reverse layup assisted by Macey Fegan, closely followed by a three-point play after drawing a foul to Buwalda. The latter basket was a third-chance attempt, as Reisma stuck with the play, following two of her own misses.
“When the moment comes, you have to take your chance,” she said, with a casualness that belied the significance of her game-winning points.
The Vikings will resume their conference schedule next weekend, with a pair of road games against strong Oakland and Detroit Mercy teams (the Titans, in fact, beat CSU at Calihan Hall last year), and the weight of that mission isn’t lost on Kielsmeier.
“The list of things we could do better is so stinkin’ long, it would roll out of this door,” he said. “We just have to get better. That’s awesome to be able to say when we’re winning games, and there’s that many things we can get better with.”
“Let’s give [Milwaukee] a lot of credit,” he added. “They played really well, they coached really well, they made it hard for us to get some of the stuff we’re used to getting, and welcome to Horizon League basketball.”
