In some ways, Cleveland State may have re-discovered its formula for beating Green Bay in Wednesday night’s 59-50 loss to the Phoenix at the Wolstein Center, even if the Vikings’ execution didn’t warrant a different result.
Instead, the Phoenix extended its winning streak to 17 games, and kept pace with Purdue Fort Wayne at the top of the Horizon League standings to stay on (potentially) a collision course for a de facto HL regular season championship game against the Mastodons on March 1st. Meanwhile, the Vikings, locked into a third-place finish, are now 21-7 overall and 12-5 in conference play.
Nevertheless, and particularly compared to last month’s anemic defeat at GB’s Kress Events Center, the contest offered a few encouraging signs ahead of a potential March rematch.
For one thing, the home team found plenty of success through Jordana Reisma. The Wisconsin native scored 19 points – the most by any CSU frontcourt player against Green Bay during head coach Chris Kielsmeier’s seven-year tenure – and did it efficiently, on a 6-for-7 effort from the floor and a 7-for-9 mark at the free throw line, after drawing seven fouls against Phoenix players. Reisma also grabbed a team-best nine rebounds.
“My teammates were really trying to get me the ball,” she said. “At times, I wasn’t really expecting them to get me the ball, but in the end, it worked out. We started off [the game], they gave me the ball, that kept working, so coach was like ‘hey, give it to her more, it’s working.’”
Against most teams, Reisma’s productivity, along with the slashing work of Mickayla Perdue, a couple Destiny Leo threes, a few easy buckets on runouts, and some Sara Guerreiro cleanup duty, is enough offense to win the game. However, against the powerhouse Phoenix, the Vikings typically also need a strong effort from behind the arc. That production, or at least the threat of it, opens things up against what is perennially one of the nation’s best defensive teams, one that rarely provides the turnovers and long rebounds needed to fuel the CSU machine.
Perhaps the best example of that is CSU’s 73-61 win in the 2023 Horizon League championship game, when the Vikings went 13-for-27 from three, with four different players connecting multiple times. Last season’s 86-63 regular season home victory involved a blistering 15-for-23 effort, highlighted by Perdue’s 7-for-8 line.
Without that help, Cleveland State-Green Bay games often resemble the sort of mud fight that the Phoenix have won hundreds of times over the years. And on Wednesday, the Vikings were 4-for-21 from three-point range. Leo was 3-for-10 from deep (though she missed all five of her second-half attempts), and Guerreiro buried her only try, but the rest of the team went 0-for-10.
“Against Green Bay, you’ve gotta hit shots,” Kielsmeier said. “When you go 4-for-21 against Green Bay, you’re going to have a hard time beating them. You go 4-for-21 against anybody, you’re probably going to have a hard time.”
If nothing else, Kielsmeier felt like his team had the opportunities in front of them, even if the results didn’t reflect it.
“We had some wide-open threes tonight, and they’re not guarding some of our players,” he continued. “I’m giving them all the green light. Anytime you want, and it’s an open shot, shoot it. And we still have players that are hesitating, so we’ve gotta find a way to get them more confidence, and we need to get some other players better looks.”
“We’ve gotta play confident and hit shots. The game’s pretty hard when you can’t hit shots.”
In a nine-point result, it’s hard to not lament at least a couple of those off-target shots. However, CSU still had a chance to win the game despite the misses – had it not been for a pair of lengthy Phoenix runs.
The first, a 15-0 surge that chewed up more than seven second quarter minutes, turned a four-point Vikings lead into a 30-19 Green Bay advantage. Twelve of those 15 points came from three-pointers by Bailey Butler, Maddy Schreiber, Butler again, and Callie Genke, part of a team-wide 8-for-17 rate that heavily contrasted Cleveland State’s deep-ball exploits.
Schreiber, who was spotless in four tries from behind the arc, finished with a team-high 16 points, while Butler added 15, along with three assists and three steals.
The other three points in the run were scored on a Natalie McNeal and-one play. McNeal shook off a slow start to ultimately deliver her usual strong outing against CSU, including 12 points and 12 rebounds.
“You’ve gotta defend,” Kielsmeier said. “It’s been too inconsistent. Tonight was really another night of that inconsistency. There were times when the effort was elite, just flying around and shutting down, and then there’s other moments where we’re just lax. We made some really big mistakes in that second quarter, when they went on that run on us. You can’t have stretches of games like that against them and expect to win.”
Crucially, the Vikings scored five points just before halftime to draw within 30-24, then continued the bounceback after the break, capping a 15-2 run and pulling back ahead by a 34-32 count on a pair of Reisma free throws with 4:09 left in the third quarter. Thanks mostly to more free throws, by Reisma and Perdue, CSU managed to nurse that narrow edge into the fourth quarter.
However, that’s when the second Phoenix run hit, a 12-0 burst that didn’t end until after the midway point of the frame, and essentially set the final margin.
“The fourth quarter, they just flexed at the beginning, and we didn’t respond,” Kielsmeier said. “We worked so hard to get the lead, but they did a phenomenal job of finishing possessions.”
“When they get on those runs, teams have to stay composed, and at times, I don’t think we were as composed as we were at Purdue [Fort Wayne],” Reisma added. “We were able to come back on some runs, but in the end, I just think we weren’t together enough.”
The good news for Cleveland State is that despite the attention that its games against Green Bay have typically drawn over the last few seasons, and despite the competitive drive that demands results every time the ball is tipped, the setback was fairly inconsequential in the broader context of the Vikings’ season. Win or lose, CSU was already set to finish third and host a quarterfinal game in the Horizon League tournament on March 6th, with the hope of advancing to, possibly, a third game this season against the Phoenix.
And then? Well, it depends how the Vikings play.
“We just have to be better than this to beat them, and we weren’t tonight.”
