After erasing a 16-point deficit against the Lake Superior State Lakers in an 82-80 home win on Jan. 16, the Hillsdale College men’s basketball team’s comeback attempts froze in the Upper Peninsula.
The Chargers fell 74-69 to the Michigan Tech Huskies last Thursday before losing 70-64 to the Northern Michigan Wildcats on Saturday, dropping to 7-5 in the GLIAC and 11-5 overall.
“There was one common theme this weekend: about the last eight seconds of the shot clock, we weren’t getting stops as a team,” head coach John Tharp said. “Both of those games were games that we had opportunities to win and we didn’t make enough plays early in the game.”
Facing an 18-point second-half deficit against the Huskies on Thursday, the Chargers rattled off a 27-9 run to tie the game at 56-56 with 5:35 remaining. But the Huskies responded with five straight points and held onto the lead for the rest of the game.
On Saturday, Hillsdale trailed Northern Michigan by 10 with 5:31 left in the game before pulling within a point of the Wildcats at 63-62 with 1:40 remaining. For the second straight game, the Chargers were unable to take the lead.
“When we get down, we start playing with an energy and a fire,” said senior forward Kyle Cooper, who leads the GLIAC with 23.2 points per game. “We have the talent and skill to win games, but for some reason we’re not coming out with that same passion.”
The Chargers shot 52 percent (25-for-48) in their loss to the Wildcats, but were outrebounded 36-23 overall and 12-2 on the offensive glass, giving Northern Michigan a 9-2 edge in second chance points.
“In the games that we’ve lost we haven’t been very good on the boards as a team,” Tharp said. “If you’re going to win on the road, your defensive rebounding has to be the key, and truthfully it wasn’t this weekend.”
“We’re shooting a high enough percentage on the offensive end that if we stop teams from getting those second chance points, and if we could even get ourselves a couple offensive rebounds, it would go a long way to helping us win a lot of the games that we’re losing,” Cooper said.
Tonight, the Chargers will host the 25th-ranked Ferris State Bulldogs at 8 p.m. in Dawn Tibbetts Potter Arena, the first game of an important stretch of three games in five days. The Chargers will travel to Grand Valley on Saturday to take on the Lakers at 3 p.m. before returning home to face the league-leading Saginaw Valley Cardinals on Monday at 8 p.m. All three teams sit ahead of Hillsdale in the GLIAC North Division standings.
“We are in a situation right now where we’ve got to pick ourselves up off the floor and fight,” Tharp said. “Every game in the North is brutal but the three games that we have coming up are three big-time teams.”
With games next Thursday and Saturday as well, Hillsdale will play a total of five games in just 10 days, but the Chargers are focusing solely on the next team on their schedule.
“You can’t get caught up in all these games in so many days, good teams focus on one day at a time and right now we’re focusing on Ferris,” said senior point guard Zach Miller, who is third in the GLIAC with 6.1 assists per game. “One thing that this team has learned is that we’ve stepped up to the challenge, we like the big moment, the big stage, and we’ve done really well against teams that have been ranked. So Ferris is just another one. They’re up next.”
The Chargers plan to play with that comeback energy for the full 40 minutes.
“We’ve just got to look at what we did last weekend, see where we went wrong, and fix it,” Cooper said. “On Thursday we’ll come out playing better basketball from the start.”
