Panthers’ offense disappears; any sort of momentum is lost
Momentum?
What momentum?
The UW-Milwaukee Panthers had to be asking themselves that Saturday afternoon, when they followed up what may have been the most impressive victory of coach Pat Baldwin’s tenure two days earlier with one of their worst 20 minutes of basketball.
Sure, Detroit Mercy’s Antoine Davis finished with a game-high 30 points. That’s almost to be expected every time out for the senior guard.
But it was the Panthers’ complete inability to execute offensively in the second half that doomed them in a 71-58 loss to the Titans at UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena.
UWM (7-13, 5-6 Horizon League) missed 17 consecutive shots and made just 5 of 29 shots (17.2%) after halftime, allowing Detroit (6-10, 4-3) to roar past the Panthers late with Davis leading the way.
“It’s disappointing,” said Baldwin, whose team dumped previous conference unbeaten Oakland, 88-78, its previous time out with superlative efforts both offensively and defensively, an effort that spurred some definite optimism.
“You want every single win, obviously. But when you start thinking about the way that we played – we had 20 assists in that game and we did a great job on their best scorer – you want to follow that up.”
A putback by Vin Baker Jr. and three by DeAndre Gholston out of the locker room to start the second half gave the Panthers a 39-33 advantage.
The Titans responded by scoring 11 of the next 12 to regain the lead. Then came a brutal stretch in which the game bogged down significantly, as both teams went stone cold from the field.
The Panthers were particularly inept, to the point they missed 17 shots in a row after Gholston’s three until Josh Thomas scored on a drive with 7 minutes 29 seconds remaining, a stretch of 11:07 without a basket.
“There were some opportunities that we had in the first half, some drive-and-kicks that we took advantage of, then I thought we kind of settled for some shots in the second half,” Baldwin said. “The ball didn’t move, didn’t have the pop that we needed in order to make the defense shift from side to side.”
Even still, the shot by Thomas gave UWM a 48-46 lead, a remarkable feat helped greatly by the continued bottling up of Davis.
He mostly settled for setting up his teammates until he finally decided to take the game over with just under 5 minutes left.
A couple of drives to the basket, a jumper from the lane after a beautiful reverse pivot and, of course, a pair of threes gave him 12 points in a span of just over 3 minutes and turned a competitive game into a rout down the stretch.
Gholston’s leaner made it 52-49 with 5:40 left.
By the time Davis had knocked down that second three with 1:34 remaining – letting loose a celebratory scream as he ran back downcourt – the score was 65-54 in favor of the Titans.