On Wednesday night at the Wolstein Center, Cleveland State used a pair of first-half runs to down Milwaukee 66-46 and improve to 16-7 overall (6-6 in the Horizon League).
Here are five things that stood out from a vital result:
1. Chris Kielsmeier’s message to the Vikings ahead of the victory was simple: “Be the person, be the player you can be, so we can be the team that we can be.”
It seemed to resonate, as CSU was at its defend-rebound-run best – a level only seen fleetingly this season against quality competition – for long spans of the first 20 minutes, enough so to make for a pretty comfortable evening.
Milwaukee held an early 5-3 edge thanks to a Grace Lomen three, but Cleveland State went on a 16-0 run from there, and subsequently, would never lead by fewer than nine points.
It was a classic Vikings surge in a lot of ways. The home team forced six Panthers turnovers in the opening quarter, and were always a threat to take things vertical, whether through one of those takeaways or after a rebound of one of UWM’s eight field goal misses. A pair of early Sarah Hurley threes offered an important counterpoint, but mostly, the points came through CSU getting down the middle of the floor with pace.
The process essentially repeated itself with a 16-2 run during the back half of the second quarter that allowed the Vikings to take a 36-13 advantage into the break. The second burst was a bit more three-heavy, with Hurley, Colbi Maples, and Jada Leonard each connecting from deep, but the encouraging patterns were still intact.
“That was as clean of a game as we’ve played in quite some time,” Kielsmeier said.
2. Of course, Cleveland State being the team that it can be isn’t possible without Maples.
The 2023-24 Horizon League Player of the Year has had an eventful few months after missing nearly all of last year with a torn ACL. Her 29-point effort against Chicago State back on November 3rd remained the best scoring total by any HL player this season until recently, and her 6-for-10 line from three-point range was essential to the Vikings’ near-upset at Northwestern later that month.
Even through all of that, it seemed obvious that her game had shifted a bit, to being far less reliant on her trademark dribble drives, and Kielsmeier frequently said that her post-injury defense was still a work in progress. An ankle sprain against College of Charleston on December 19th knocked Maples out for a couple more games, and after returning, she entered a slump that saw her shoot just 18-for-88 (20.5 percent) over seven contests.
That seemed to come to an emphatic end on Wednesday.
After an early miss, Maples went on to key CSU’s 16-0 first quarter run with six of the Vikings’ final ten points, all coming on drives to the basket or free throws resulting from them. She then launched the 16-2 run to close the half with a three-pointer out of a timeout, later adding another two points, along with assists on buckets by Izabella Zingaro and Macey Fegan.
“Me personally, the player I am, when I’m at my best, I don’t care [about missing shots],” Maples said. “When I miss shots, I’m always…if it is open, I’m shooting. And so when I got away from that, that’s when I was like, yeah, something’s not right. In this game after I missed [the first shot] I didn’t care.”
Her final line included 20 points on 7-for-15 shooting, along with six helpers, her best total of the season.
“She ran the game tonight,” Kielsmeier said. “I was able to see some things that I wanted, and communicate those things to her, and her basketball mind and IQ just took over. She’ll get a lot of credit for the 20 points, which we certainly needed from her, but she made some big-time plays, and that’s Colbi affecting the game in a variety of ways without scoring. Not every player has that ability. She does.”
Perhaps just as importantly as any of that, her confidence seems to be fully back online, after some admitted moments of doubt. So, with everything clicking once again, can Maples be the best player in the conference for the season’s decisive moments?
“Does it look it?” she asked, rhetorically.
3. Though it didn’t really have much of an impact on the final outcome, the way Cleveland State and Milwaukee used their benches was an interesting study in contrasts.
By halftime, the Panthers had already used a whopping 13 players, their entire roster save freshmen Lizzy Favret and Olivia Olson, who are presumably being held out of action to preserve their respective first years of eligibility. Jorey Buwalda led the way for the visitors with 13 points and 12 rebounds, but all 13 visitors played for at least six minutes, and 12 recorded something under one of the three primary stat columns.
Though Vikings bench players like Paula Pique, Laurel Rockwood, and Ella Van Weelden saw decent amounts of time on the floor, CSU used a much more conventional rotation. There was also a mild oddity attached to that deployment, as Cleveland State’s five starters scored all 66 of the team’s points.
Maples and Leonard (who had 14 points and three assists) were probably the headliners, though Zingaro (11 points and 11 rebounds) and Fegan (12 points and three assists) had quietly effective outings as well. Hurley finished 3-for-5 from three-point range and added five rebounds, as she continues to develop into Kielsmeier’s ideal for the three position.
4. It wasn’t a perfect effort. The Panthers actually outscored Cleveland State in the second half, including a 7-0 run over the closing five minutes of the evening. After Rita Gomes knocked down a three with 2:27 to go (the last points by either team, as it turned out), Kielsmeier walked out to the center court logo to call timeout.
A less-noticed lull came right on the heels of the Vikings’ first major run of the contest. Milwaukee responded by dabbling with the zone that frustrated CSU during its loss at the Klotsche Center four weeks earlier, and managed to trim their deficit to 20-11 by the second quarter media break, following a tough Kendall Barnes layup.
Though it’s hard to argue that home team’s control of the game was ever truly in jeopardy, Wednesday night had begun to show some similar patterns to that Panthers win in Milwaukee, including the fact that the Vikings were shooting just 26.1 percent from the floor at that point.
Regardless, if there was a threat, it quickly ended after the timeout with the Maples three, followed closely by Leonard’s shot-clock-beating bomb. Those buckets began CSU’s second surge, the one that saw them score 16 of the first half’s last 18 points.
Still, those slow stretches will gnaw at Kielsmeier a bit.
“We’ve got to show more of a killer instinct,” he said “We had [the lead] at 29 or whatever it was. Knock ’em out, and get that thing to 35 or 40, and show that you can be that kind of team. We’ve struggled with that. That has not been something that we’ve done consistently well, and elite teams do that.”
That the Vikings had a response when pushed in the second quarter is an encouraging sign, but as Kielsmeier sees it, those situations are one of the only times he’d rather play offense than defense.
“I know this team has more in them,” he added. “I know what this team is capable of, and I’m going to push and push and push until I help them get there, and maybe we won’t, but it ain’t going to be a lack of trying from anybody in this program. I can assure you that.”
5. Kielsmeier hates the phrase “must-win,” and asking him whether any game meets that status is liable to return a sarcastic “they’re all must-wins.”
Still, there’s really no way around the fact that the Milwaukee game was about as close to a must-win as it gets for Cleveland State right now. The contest was wedged in the middle of four road games, and the Vikings had already lost the first two of the segment, at Purdue Fort Wayne and Youngstown State last week. Those defeats dropped the Vikings to sixth place in the Horizon League, bad news in a conference where only the top five receive home games in the tournament, before the venue shifts to neutral Indianapolis.
What’s more, CSU suddenly finds itself pushed from behind by resurgent Oakland and IU Indianapolis teams. A loss to UWM, in fact, would have dropped the Vikings behind OU, which simultaneously defeated the Jaguars on Wednesday.
The coach came about as close as he gets to admitting the game was a must-win during his weekly radio show two days earlier.
“It’s been a tough stretch for us,” he said. “Anytime you’ve got a schedule where you play four on the road in five games, you’re going to really value that one game at home even that much more.”
Mission accomplished, in one sense. In another, though, the job is only beginning. Two more road contests await, of course, at Northern Kentucky and IU Indy. Those are followed by games at the Wolstein Center against contenders PFW and Green Bay, then another bus trip, to Robert Morris.
For the Vikings to make up enough lost ground, they’ll need to keep winning. By definition, that involves somehow correcting a 2-6 record in true away games.
“We have stunk on the road, and we need to show that we’ve got the toughness to go be an elite team on the road because we do, but we haven’t showed it,” Kielsmeier said. “I am a results guy. We have not played well on the road.”
“[We need] the confidence that we know we can play our best at any time,” Maples added. “It’s just up to us, and honestly place doesn’t matter. We just know we have to bring our A game wherever we go, home or away.”
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