Monday night’s Horizon League Tournament semifinal between No. 1 seed Oakland and No. 7 seed Cleveland State didn’t disappoint. The game featured seven ties and seven lead changes as the Vikings put up an admirable fight against the league’s top team.
Although the Golden Grizzlies didn’t score until nearly five minutes into the game, they quickly clicked on the offensive end of the floor. DQ Cole caught fire with 14 first-half points and Jack Gohlke drilled three triples to help Oakland head into the locker room knotted with Cleveland State at 38.
Gohlke lit it up in the second half, too, and he finished the night shooting 7-14 from beyond the arc. He and Cole scored 21 and 20, respectively, and Horizon League Player of the Year Trey Townsend came up clutch late to help Oakland to the win.
Not everything went perfect, though.
Rocket Watts played just three minutes before leaving the floor with an apparent leg injury, Blake Lampman shot just 2-9 from the floor and with another game — the most important one of the season — coming up tomorrow, five Golden Grizzlies played at least 34 minutes.
Oakland head coach Greg Kampe was quick to note in his postgame press conference that things won’t always come easy, as was shown on Monday night.
“A lot of things that happened tonight happened. I try to tell media people in the Detroit area that don’t understand how much pressure are on players in a one-bid league,” Kampe said. “Already, four or five No. 1 seeds have been beaten, and the championship week just started… Appalachian State, a phenomenal team, lost. It’s hard. It’s really hard.”
It certainly was hard against the Vikings on Monday night. Oakland led by as many as 11 points in the second half, but Cleveland State clawed its way back to put the fans of both teams on the edge of their seats.
“Everything that we’re not as a team, we did tonight,” Kampe said. “We shot 30-some percent from the floor, 32 [percent] from the three. We’re a great free-throw-shooting team. We shot 60-some percent, but we found a way to win, and it was at the defensive end.”
Although Kampe felt his team’s performance was the antithesis of their normal identity, Oakland still found a way to win, which is what great teams do. Lesser teams would have folded when Cleveland State tied the game with 2:36 to go.
Heading into Tuesday night’s championship game, Kampe feels incredibly confident in his players’ ability to secure another victory.
“I feel confident. I feel real confident about them and the way they go about their business because they’ve proven all year — they deserve this. They’re the regular-season champions. They deserve to have this opportunity. Now it’s on them. It ain’t on me, it’s on them.
“We went to three tournaments in six years,” Kampe said. “And then we moved to the Horizon League, and we thought it might be easy, and it’s been tough, even though we’ve won championships, and now we’ve never been able to win this tournament.”
It’ll be on the players to win the conference tournament on Tuesday night and punch Oakland’s ticket to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 13 years.
Tuesday night’s tip-off is scheduled for 7 p.m. No. 6 Milwaukee stands in between Oakland and the Big Dance.
