When Mark Montgomery took over as head coach at Detroit Mercy, he built a foundation that included not only high school recruits, but a pair of transfers: Legend Geeter and Orlando Lovejoy.
In Year 2, Montgomery’s plan has come one step closer to the ultimate goal: A Horizon League Tournament championship and with it, an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. The Titans, seeded third, outlasted No. 2 seed Robert Morris, 70-64, led by Lovejoy’s 21 points and 16 points from Lance Stone, one of the dynamic freshman that Montgomery has brought in during his two seasons at the helm.
“I’m old school,” Montgomery said of the team-building strategy that he’s stuck to from the beginning. “You get a couple players, but if you’re going to build something special, you’re gonna have to bring some freshmen and some sophomores in and find a way to keep them.”
The tone for Detroit Mercy was set by Lovejoy early on, as the Colonials set forth their own plan by feeding Horizon League Player of the Year DeSean Goode. As RMU did with Goode, the Titans did the same, feeding Lovejoy the basketball early, which resulted in eight points for the senior.
“Coach drew up the first play for me to see how they would defend me,” Lovejoy said. “And once I scored the first shot, I knew I had it rolling. But the goal isn’t for me to score. It’s just to score. And I had it going the first couple of possessions, and that’s how we scored.”
From there, it was a back-and-forth brawl through most of the first half, as both teams remains locked in ties at both the under-15 and under-12 media timeouts. It was only when redshirt freshman Tyler Spratt drained a three-pointer, the first for either side in the entire game, with 7:56 left in the half did it seem as if the battle had swing in Detroit Mercy’s favor.
However, that’s not entirely how that came to pass. The Colonials overtook the Titans and stayed ahead for the remainder of the first half, eventually settling into a three-point lead going into the locker room.
In the opening minutes of the second half, Robert Morris stretched their advantage, ballooning its lead to six, courtesy of a Kaleb Brown triple with 17:56 left in the game. Undaunted, Detroit Mercy slowly but surely chipped away, and five minutes later, thanks to a Lovejoy jumper, the Titans were back out on top again, and would bookend a 12-2 run with another Lovejoy jumper.
Detroit Mercy would never relinquish the lead for the rest of the contest, even though the Colonials made a concerted effort to change that dynamic, cutting the lead to a single point with 1:31 left after Ryan Prather, Jr. hit a lay-up. Lovejoy’s clutch free throw shooting shined through, though, as he drained a pair with 47 seconds left, and another pair with 25 seconds left after Darius Livingston again made it a one-point game.
In the end, though, it would be a missed free throw by Goode and Ryan Kalambay, one of Montgomery’s first high school recruits, who snatched away the rebound from Goode’s hands and was rewarded with two chances at the charity stripe to extend the lead, which he cashed in on.
Spratt would also finish the game in double figures, scoring 10, and Geeter would lead the Titans in rebounds, tearing down 10 boards, sharing a game-high with Goode.
The title game will see Detroit Mercy pitted against the top seed, Wright State. The regular season between these two teams was split and both games tightly-contested, with the Raiders eking out a two-point win at Calihan Hall, and the Titans returning the favor and beating Wright State on its home floor in the return match-up.
Subscribe to our emails, and get our latest posts in your inbox, plus a weekly digest of everything we've published!
