Cleveland State frequently struggles at Green Bay. So does just about everyone else who has visited the Phoenix over the last 25 years.
Still, something about the Vikings’ 66-52 loss in the Kress Events Center on Thursday night felt a little different than other recent clashes between the teams, which have generally carried Horizon League championship-level stakes.
Maybe it was the fact that it didn’t this time around, at least not to the familiar extent. After all, neither team presently leads the HL standings; that distinction belongs to Purdue Fort Wayne, which remains unbeaten in league play, including wins against both CSU and Green Bay.
Meanwhile, the Vikings’ defeat in Northeast Wisconsin was their third of the conference season, likely a death blow to any realistic chance of defending their 2023-24 regular season crown, given that Chris Kielsmeier’s squad now sits three games behind the Mastodons and two behind one-loss Green Bay with nine remaining on the schedule.
Kielsmeier stopped short of acknowledging that much, though he admitted that his team “has a lot of work to do” to match Green Bay, and it needs to complete that work within a season now approaching its final full month.
“They’re really good, they’re really connected, they’re playing great basketball right now, and we’re not at that level,” he said.
When Cleveland State has defeated the Phoenix in recent years, it has generally been because of efficient shooting generated by drive-and-kick plays after their preference – getting the ball inside – is taken away. In last season’s victory at the Wolstein Center, Mickayla Perdue hit seven of her eight three-point attempts on the way to 30 points, while CSU shot north of 50 percent as a whole.
The Vikings went 13-for-27 from three-point range and 22-for-23 at the free throw line when they beat GB for the 2023 Horizon League tournament title, led by the likes of Gabriella Smith and Barbara Zieniewska, who combined for eight of those 13 triples.
However, the Phoenix made it clear that wouldn’t be happening again early on Thursday, when Bailey Butler and Natalie McNeal took turns scrambling first-quarter three-point attempts by Destiny Leo. Leo did eventually manage five clean field goal tries, but missed them all and ended up scoreless in a game for the first time since a contest against Milwaukee during her freshman year.
“[Leo is] Nat’s matchup from the beginning,” Phoenix head coach Kayla Karius said. “She had a hand in her face, she just got nothing easy going. As a shooter, when you don’t get anything easy going, the ball gets tipped or blocked out of your hands once or twice early, that’s hard sometimes to come back from. So I give Nat a ton of credit, she locked up defensively.”
Perdue didn’t fare any better from distance, missing all six of her three-point attempts and committing five turnovers, three in the first quarter. Green Bay also managed to close off attempts to get the ball inside to Jordana Reisma, as the star post player only had two field goal attempts all evening.
If the Vikings couldn’t score from the outside, and couldn’t score from the inside, where were they supposed to go?
Well, nowhere, to be blunt, given that Cleveland State had just 17 points at halftime.
“The way the game started, I think we really set the tone with our intensity and with our attention to detail on who [Cleveland State] is,” Karius said. “Clearly these two teams have a lot of history, especially in recent years. Sometimes it’s even harder, because you know each other so well, and I just give our players a lot of credit, they were really locked into their personnel and what they’re trying to get out of it. I think you could see from the start they just couldn’t get anything easy. It affected them.”
“I think that might be as connected and as a long-tenured together basketball team as there’s been in the history of college basketball,” Kielsmeier said. “The core of that group has been together for five years, and they play like it.”
He has a point. Kielsmeier’s starting lineup for that 2023 championship game featured Leo, but also long-departed players Zieniewska, Smith, Brittni Moore, and Amele Ngwafang. Green Bay’s starters that day included Butler, Jasmine Kondrakiewicz, Callie Genke, and Cassie Schiltz, all of whom also started on Thursday. Graduated Sydney Levy rounded out the Phoenix quintet in 2023, though McNeal played 27 minutes off the bench and was the team’s leading scorer.
McNeal, nicknamed Middie McNeal for her preferred area of the offensive side of the floor, was again at her zone-exploiting best with 24 points on 10-for-13 shooting. The former Saint Louis player who transferred home before the 2022-23 season now averages 20.9 points per game in seven career outings against the Vikings.
“We have a lot of really good three-point shooters, and Cleveland State knows that, and they have to honor that, so it does open things up for me,” she said. “That was a big focus this week, trying to find where they’re not guarding us and getting to the open spots and make them pay that way.”
That’s not to say that CSU didn’t do some things well. In particular, those usually-lethal three-point shooters McNeal mentioned were held in check for a lot of the contest, with Schiltz, Genke, Butler, and Maddy Schreiber (who returned from a wrist injury that had sidelined her since mid-December) managed only a 4-for-16 effort during the first 40 minutes. That much was an improvement from CSU’s previous visit to the Kress Events Center, when Kielsmeier chided his “high school zone” following a prolific shooting night by the Phoenix.
Perdue eventually managed to find some traction by driving to the basket and getting to the free throw line, finishing with a team-best 17 points. Mya Moore enjoyed her best game since transferring from Seattle University with 14 points, seven rebounds, and sound defensive work in cutting off GB’s frequent cuts down low.
That was enough to place Cleveland State, somehow, into a 45-41 game early in the fourth quarter. The brief spark of hope evaporated quickly though, as the Phoenix began to connect from outside. A Butler three was answered quickly by Sara Guerreiro, but Genke’s deep ball two possessions later began a 9-0 run that sealed the rematch of last year’s HL title game and sent most of 2,177 people into the unseasonably warm Green Bay night in a good mood.
“Our defense just fell apart,” Kielsmeier lamented. “For us, it’s about one thing: trying to find some sort of consistency. We just have too many moments in big games, big situations that get ourselves beat. Sometimes, we’re also getting outplayed. I hate saying that, because I think that’s a reflection of myself.”
“They just made some big plays, and we made some big mistakes. You can’t do that against them, they’re going to hit the shot when you make a mistake.”
Will the Vikings be able to correct those mistakes and build some cohesion during the last four weeks of the regular season, in time for a conference tournament that is likely to be the team’s only path to a banner ceremony this year? Even with something of a blueprint for accomplishing that, it’s much easier said than done.
“They’re really hard to beat at what they do well,” Kielsmeier said. “And we just didn’t get them out of what they do well.”