In the final moments of the game, Milwaukee turned a five-point, 67-62 deficit into a 68-67 victory. Parkside had them beat. They knew they had them beat. The crowd knew it. But the Panthers persevered.
The first big play came from Ryan Haggerty, who came up big with a three-pointer from the corner to bring the Panthers within one possession of the Rangers. On the play, Milwaukee swung the ball around but didn't have a good shot. In a big man-up move, Haggerty scored his seventh point on a gutsy bomb of a three from the corner right in front of the Milwaukee bench. The score was 67-65. The crowd was excited.
Following a 30-second timeout, the Rangers brought the ball up court only to see Bobo Niang collect his seventh steal of the night by way of Bryant Smith. On the drive to the basket, Smith hacked Niang on his way up to the hoop, causing the official to call an intentional foul, giving the Panthers two shots and the ball. Niang made the first of two shots, but clanked the second. The score was 67-66. The crowd was nervous.
Jordan Aaron knew he was going to take the shot. There was no way the new point guard of the Milwaukee Panthers was going to let this one go to someone else. After dribbling around the top of the key for a moment, Aaron drove the lane, going up with a runner and drawing contact. The ball didn't fall, but the whistle blew. Bryant Smith connected on another foul, picking up his fourth and fifth in the final 15 seconds.
You can see the team was 12-of-27 from the line tonight. They were 10-of-25 before Jordan Aaron calmly stepped up to the free throw line and swished both shots. On the ensuing shot, Nick Neari missed a running three-pointer with time expiring. The score was 68-67. The crowd was relieved.
There were many parallels to be taken from the Parkside game in 2006 when the Rangers came into the Cell and beat the Panthers. One that can't be taken is the student attendance. By the five-minute mark of the second half in that game, students had flooded towards the exits in disgust of a team coming off its second straight NCAA Tournament appearance. Tonight's crowd of 800 or so students stuck it out to the final gun, getting louder and prouder as the game started reaching towards the end. They seemingly enjoyed the close game; hopefully they'll be back.
What wasn't back was Paris Gulley, lost last week for the first month of the season with a broken non-shooting hand. Much of the troubles in the first half came from his absence; without the forever-open Gulley to catch and shoot bombs from the outside, Jordan Aaron spent a little too much time trying to create for himself. Without that helper on the outside to kick out the ball, Demetrius Harris drove the lane and put up many contested shots. He finished the first half 3-for-8 from the field. The result was obvious; Milwaukee had 2 assists to 9 turnovers heading into the locker room at halftime, compared to 10 assists to 4 turnovers for Parkside. The score wasn't the only lopsided stat.
What made matters worse was the total lack of perimeter defense for the Panthers in the first half. They allowed Parkside to shoot 6-for-11 from three-point land, in addition to several long two-pointers that weren't closed properly. The Panthers let a guy named Conrad Krutwig score 22 points on them, 17 in the first half alone. Jeremy Saffold had 12 points at halftime on 5-of-8 shooting. Krutwig was 7-of-8.
Whatever was needed to be said was said by coach Rob Jeter in the locker room. Through necessary adjustments, Milwaukee eked out a victory against a team that had every right to win against the D-I opponent.
In the second half, it was like night and day. Parkside couldn't handle the new found toughness and speed on the perimeter, shooting 1-for-5 from beyond the arc the rest of the way. The Panthers started distributing the ball a bit better and finished with seven assists, but more importantly they barely coughed it up - Milwaukee only committed four turnovers in the second half. Harris made all five shots he took in the second half, responding well to the Hack-a-Harris defense.
The game would have looked much differently had Harris been even an adequate free throw shooter; by the end of the game, the Rangers were practically committing assault to make sure he wouldn't keep scoring buckets in the block.
And herein lies the same problem as last year. At one point during his press conference, Jeter remarked that "Harris hasn't missed a free throw in practice in about a week." Perhaps it's true that the team doesn't have an issue shooting free throws in practice. But they exhibited somewhat of a mental block during games last year, and tonight was no different. Harris and Bobo Niang combined to of 4-of-17 from the charity stripe, single-handedly keeping Parkside in front for much of the second half. Milwaukee briefly took the lead on an Evan Richard bucket with 9:49 left in the game, but Parkside snatched it right back. It wasn't until Jordan Aaron's final free throw that the Panthers finally took the lead for good.
"You gotta hand it to Parkside. This game is like this every year. It is a battle, we always have to figure out a way to pull something out at the end, and it's a great learning game for us," Jeter said. "They came in here and won the game, we stole it from them."
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