Cleveland State fell to 12-5 overall, and just 2-4 in Horizon League play, following a 66-58 loss to Milwaukee on Sunday – the latest, and possibly ugliest, in a string of concerning defeats this season.
Here are five things that stood out in UWM’s Klotsche Center:
1. It’s awfully hard to avoid the idea that the defeat may very well be the worst CSU has experienced during Chris Kielsmeier’s run at the school, at least when measured against expectations.
Given that the coach’s eight teams have historically taken care of business against heavy underdogs, there isn’t an overwhelming list of contenders for the dubious distinction.
A sweep at the hands of Robert Morris in 2021-22 was rough, but those Colonials were only a shade under .500, and the Vikings were dealing with COVID-19 issues during the road half of the series. Detroit Mercy’s 2023-24 team, which beat Cleveland State in Calihan Hall, was in the middle of a sharp upturn under Kate Achter, and the result ultimately didn’t stop the Vikings from winning the Horizon League’s regular season title. Last year’s setback against a putrid Akron team was the team’s first time playing after Colbi Maples’ ACL tear, and at least a little understandable with that context.
Tripping against Milwaukee, which entered the day 4-11 overall (with two of those wins coming against lower-division opponents) and ranked 318th in the NET, doesn’t really carry a ton of mitigation. It’s just a bad loss, one that all but eliminates CSU from this year’s HL standings race and also might have serious implications for the Vikings’ postseason hopes.
“[We have a] lack of fight, a lack of accountability,” Kielsmeier said. “Another game where we got outplayed and outcoached. Here we go again.”
Those comments allude to at least two other occasions where the coach called out the Vikings’ effort, including December 29th’s home loss to Youngstown State, and a December 4th upset at UDM, a result that has aged rather poorly, given the Titans’ struggles.
“It’s not the first time,” he continued. “But our reluctance to show change and to take accountability for the things that we need to do in a more disciplined way isn’t there.”
2. All of that seemed an unlikely discussion point at roughly 3:30 PM on Sunday.
After three-pointers by Grace Lomen and Jada Williams gave Milwaukee an early 6-4 edge, the Vikings closed the quarter on a 16-2 run. The visitors’ lead would eventually peak at 28-12, just over three minutes into the second period.
What went right? Just about everything.
The Panthers missed 13 consecutive field goal attempts at one stage, while CSU found plenty of traction on the offensive end through Izabella Zingaro and her seven first-quarter points. The Vikings offset Zingaro nicely with triples by Maples and Sarah Hurley, with the latter’s shot swirling the rim and eventually falling to offer something of an exclamation point at the end of the opening frame.
At that moment, it was just about unfathomable that Milwaukee would go on to win the game, let alone outscore CSU 54-30 over the final 27 minutes. Yet that’s exactly what happened.
What went wrong? Just about everything.
Milwaukee shifted to a zone to cut off the inside game, and the Vikings weren’t able to shoot the Panthers out of it. After hitting those first two triples, CSU was just 2-for-19 from deep for the rest of the afternoon. Maples and Jada Leonard had the two makes over the final 30 minutes, but combined for a 3-for-14 line overall.
“If you go 4-for-21 from three-point range, you’re going to have a hard time getting them out of [the zone],” Kielsmeier said. “And I was disappointed. We have a lot of players that had wide-open looks that didn’t even want to shoot. And that is not what I want from our players. I want confidence and a belief to step up in the moment and make the play.”
The impacts were felt all over the floor. With Cleveland State unable to work inside, even beyond Zingaro – drives by the guards were mostly ineffective or non-existent – the Vikings only attempted 12 free throws, tied for the 21st fewest of Kielsmeier’s tenure (coincidentally, or perhaps not, one of the 20 smaller counts came on Friday at Green Bay). CSU forced a relatively-low 13 turnovers and managed 17 points from them, far from enough to carry the day.
3. None of that would have mattered, had a Milwaukee team that averaged 57.4 points per game against Division I competition not found a way to score 66 on a program that considers itself a defense-first operation.
Jorey Buwalda did a lot of the damage for the home team, including 20 points, seven rebounds, and four assists. Lomen added 16 points, including four three-pointers.
The last of Lomen’s shots gave the Panthers the lead for good with 2:02 remaining. It was one piece of a 17-2 UWM run to close the game, and erase the notion that CSU’s seven-point advantage halfway through the frame would be enough to escape with a heavily-flawed win.
Notably, the shot was also wide open, thanks to an extremely late defensive rotation.
“Down the stretch, it was clear to anybody that watched that game who wanted to win and who was content with what was going on,” Kielsmeier said. “And that’s hard to say. I know it’s hard for our fans to hear, but keep it real. And that’s what this program does. So if we can’t show more heart, more fight, more toughness, we don’t deserve to win.”
“For Grace [Lomen], as a senior, to hit some of the shots that she did…you always need your seniors to step up in big moments, and I thought she had a ‘senior game,'” UWM coach Kyle Rechlicz offered from the other sideline.
Lomen wasn’t the only player making shots.
After that first quarter, Milwaukee went 22-for-38 (58 percent) from the floor, including 17-for-28 (61 percent) in the second half.
“A 25-point [third] quarter, a 44-point [second] half or whatever it was, is just bad, bad defense,” Kielsmeier lamented. “And you’re just not going to win games in this league doing that.”
4. Somehow, the Milwaukee game was even more eventful for Zingaro than Friday’s loss at Green Bay, when she was in the spotlight for two late free throw misses.
The graduate student spent more than 30 minutes on the floor for the fifth time this season, as it’s become increasingly clear that the center position is less of a rotation than initially imagined. Shey Magassa took the remainder of the minutes in the middle, while Laurel Rockwood didn’t play in either end of CSU’s Wisconsin trip.
Sink or swim with Zingaro? There was a little of both on Sunday.
The Montana transfer scored 23 of the Vikings’ 58 points and seemed nearly unstoppable in certain moments. In others, the Panthers throwing the house at her clearly took its toll, including six turnovers, as well as a pair of crucial late-game misses where it seemed like her internal clock was running a bit faster than it needed to.
“She’s turned it over way too much the last two games,” Kielsmeier said. “And we’ve been working on it since the summer, knowing that teams were going to double her like that. And I thought as a coaching staff, we had her more prepared for it, but the execution is clear that we don’t, and we’ve got to help her.”
“But she’s also got to grow up and learn quickly, because if you’re going to go to her that much and she can’t handle the reads better than that, then it hurts you on both ends of the floor. How many of those turnovers got back down on us for easy shots? It’s another game where you can say [if] you changed two, three plays, you would have won. We don’t make enough winning plays.”
5. Cleveland State’s travel situation has been a three-week run of absolute brutality.
To recap, the Vikings played a home game against Northern Kentucky on December 16th, then left for the Puerto Rico Clasico almost immediately, ahead of a meeting with College of Charleston three days later. Following that event, team members scattered to their respective hometowns for Christmas, then reunited in Cleveland to play Youngstown State on Monday.
On New Year’s Day, CSU made the always-arduous trek up to Green Bay to play the Phoenix on Friday, before Sunday’s game at UWM. The pair of Wisconsin affairs has long been considered the most difficult trip in the Horizon League (at least for nine of the 11 conference schools).
Cleveland State will now head back to the Wolstein Center to play Wright State on Wednesday. In all, that’s a post-Christmas stretch of four HL games in ten days, with a pair of home contests bookending the trip to America’s Dairyland.
After the mostly-encouraging loss to the Phoenix, Kielsmeier mentioned some travel difficulties getting to Northeast Wisconsin (the Vikings flew, but thanks to delays in Chicago, it ultimately took longer than busing would have), but his overall outlook could be characterized as “it is what it is.”
By the end of the disaster in Milwaukee on Sunday, his tune had changed pretty dramatically.
“This stretch and what the league asked us to do was brutal,” he began. “I think we need to look at scheduling in a very complex way in this league. Wright State plays their last game on Friday and is sitting at home waiting for us, and we’ve got to bus back tonight, and get in at two or three in the morning, whatever we’re going to do, and then play on Wednesday. Like what kind of competitive advantages are these things? You ask a team to play four games in ten days when other teams aren’t doing that, with the kind of travel that we had in place…”
“I know it sounds like I’m making an excuse, because we knew it was coming and we had to deal with it, but I think there’s a better way to do it and we need to find it.”
The good news? The Vikings’ next three games are in Cleveland, and the team won’t hit the road again until January 21st, at Purdue Fort Wayne.
“Good news,” however, is subject to some subjectivity.
“You can play in Puerto Rico, you can play in Milwaukee, you can play at Wolstein, no matter where you play, you’ve got to execute and you’ve got to play well,” Kielsmeier said. “And how we’ve played after break is not good. If we think things are just going to change because we’re now back in the Wolstein Center, guess what? We just got done playing [and losing] a week ago there. So we’ve got to play better. We’ve got to coach better. We’ve got to want it more.”
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