By Dan Weber NKyTribune sports reporter
So many questions about this Thomas More men’s basketball team as it hosted the Hillsdale (Mich.) men Tuesday night in the second half of a Great Midwest Athletic Conference postseason playoff doubleheader between the schools’ men’s and women’s teams.
The first question: How in the heck did the Saints, 12-8 in the GMAC, get to host the 13-7 Chargers in this matchup of fourth- and fifth-place teams? And what was the complicated formula that allowed them to do that?
“No idea,” said Saints’ junior guard Jacob Jones, whose perfect night — shooting 10 for 10 from the field for 22 points — made it possible for TMU to escape with a one-point win, 72-71, after leading 59-39 with 9 ½ minutes left.
The next question: How did the Saints, playing maybe their best game of the season for 30 minutes or so, manage to get outscored, 32-13, the last quarter of the game?
How do you do that and still win? Only one way: You start with a 20-point lead. And then the horn goes off right after Hillsdale’s final three-point buzzer beater.
TMU Coach Justin Ray had a premonition something was up despite that 20-point lead. “I told Coach (Spencer) Berlekamp that this was going to be a long nine minutes,” Ray said. “I was right.”
The lucky part for TMU (18-11, 13-8 GMAC) is that the game wasn’t a second longer. Now they advance to Friday’s semifinal against No. 8 seed Tiffin after Tiffin’s shocking upset of No. 1 Kentucky Wesleyan in Owensboro. Had Wesleyan won as expected, TMU would be heading to Owensboro to play a team that had beaten the Saints twice. Now they get a Tiffin team that TMU beat, 76-72 in overtime, and on a neutral court at Walsh, in North Canton, Ohio, as the highest-seed left and host of the semifinals and championship game.
“For 30 minutes of this game, we were pretty good,” Ray said. And even when Hillsdale heated up, he didn’t call a timeout right away because “I thought we’d keep scoring.”
But against a Hillsdale defense that was allowed to get physical with the Saints, that didn’t happen. “We could not score,” Ray said, “we had a lot of opportunities but we could not make ‘em.”
And a Hillsdale team that had split with TMU, winning 73-65 at TMU but losing 71-70 at home, was making them. Just not enough to avoid a second one-point loss to Thomas More.
“As a team, we feel we can beat anybody in the league,” said Jones, who made one blow-by move after another against a switching Hillsdale defense that often saw him matched up against “a big,” he said, and they could not keep up with him. “We knew they couldn’t guard the ball (at least when Jones had it) so I wanted to play downhill).”
But for that final run, it was Hillsdale playing downhill, chipping away at a TMU team that could not keep scoring. But with 2:54 left and Hillsdale within 10, 66-56, down from 20, Eli Howard, a redshirt junior guard from Newport Central Catholic, hit a big three. It was the last shot from out on the floor the Saints would make.
Then, with the score 69-62, TMU struck again as Reid Jolly, who scored 14 points, fired a perfect Joe Burrow length-of-the-court strike to a streaking Jones against the press to finish his perfect night with his 10th field goal as he got behind the secondary, as it were.
It’s something they’ve done anywhere from 10 times (according to Ray) or 25 to 30 times (according to Jones) thanks to Jolly’s great arm. So now things were looking good, up 71-62 with 1:11 left. But Hillsdale kept coming, closing it to 71-68 with six points in less than 60 seconds as TMU missed just enough free throws to give them a chance.
But finally, with 6.2 seconds left, 6-8 sophomore center Mitchell Rylee, who just missed a double-double with 12 rebounds and nine points, hit the second of two from the line for a 72-68 lead and the final Hillsdale three couldn’t bring the Chargers back enough.
Great job by Hillsdale assistant John Cheng, stepping in for head coach Keven Bradley, out with unspecified health issues, Ray said, recalling his days as an assistant.
But Ray also praised his own guys for having outgrown his own thoughts about them early in the season “when I thought we weren’t very good . . . the biggest thing with this team has been the growth . . . there are a whole bunch of new guys.”
And now they get to go to the semifinals against a team they beat on a neutral court. So it could be worse. And would have been had Rylee not hit that final free throw.
Or Jones might not have gone 10 for 10, which brings up another question? Was that the best ever for a TMU player?
“Best since I’ve been here,” said Ray. But best ever? They’re still looking it up. Maybe by Friday we’ll know.
SCORING SUMMARY
HILLSDALE 23 48—71
THOMAS MORE 40 32—72
HILLSDALE (18-10, 13-8 GMAC): Reuter 4-8 0-2 0-0 8, Yarian 2-2 1-1 0-0 5, Janowski 5-8 0-0 0-2 10, Woodhams 7-13 2-3 2-2 18, Vasiu 0-2 0-0 0-0 0, Glaser 5-7 0-0 1-3 11, McWhinnie 0-2 0-2 2-2 2, McCollum 3-10 1-5 1-1 8, Bolte 1-2 1-1 0-0 3, Radisevic 3-6 0-1 0-0 6; TOTALS: 30-60 5-15 6-10 71.
THOMAS MORE (18-11, 13-8 GMAC): Jolly 5-16 1-3 3-4 14, Rylee 3-3 0-0 3-4 9, Jones 10-10 0-0 2-2 22, George 1-4 0-1 0-0 2, Dudukovich 5-12 3-9 2-4 15, Browne 0-1 0-1 0-0 0, Howard 4-6 2-4 0-0 10, Vieth 0-1 0-1 0-0 0; TOTALS: 28-53 6-19 10-14 72.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.