MILWAUKEE – The Milwaukee men's basketball team scored seven straight points with the game on the line and BJ Freeman iced the victory with a pair of free throws in the closing seconds to secure an 83-79 victory over Detroit Mercy Tuesday night at the Klotsche Center in the opening round of the 2024 Barbasol Horizon League Championships.
 
"We came out sluggish in the first half and gave them a lead," head coach Bart Lundy said. "I don't know if we were looking ahead a bit, but we did enough to come back and tie it up at halftime and then battle in the second half. But it was definitely a battle."
 
In a pressure-packed postseason opener, the Panthers (18-14) broke the 12^th tie of the evening with two huge plays by Faizon Fields, who made it 75-73 with a tough layup with 2:19 to go and then drew a charge on the next possession by the Titans (1-31).
 
"I'd like to give our guys credit for really deciding they were going to put their heads down and get to the rim [in the second half]," Lundy said. "Faizon (Fields) was really good – he got two huge buckets in the last four minutes and then BJ (Freeman) finished it off with a couple of drives. The basket by Faizon and then the charge was really the separator – it was as little as that – it was those two plays back-to-back."
 
Freeman then added back-to-back layups to give the home team some breathing room against the pesky Detroit Mercy squad, before securing the victory with a pair of free throws with just 6.7 seconds remaining.
 
Freeman recorded his third consecutive double-double and his sixth career game of 30-or-more points, finishing with an even 30 points to go along with a game-high 10 rebounds. He added five assists and went a perfect 9-for-9 from the free throw line. He extended his streak of scoring 20+ points to eight games in a row, the longest since Shannon Smith had a similar eight-game win back in the 1994-95 season.
 
Fields contributed 13 points and six rebounds to the win, with his basket and charge taken sparking the team just when it needed it the most. He finished 6-of-7 from the floor on a night where the MKE offense connected on 65.4 percent (17-of-26) from the floor in the second half but could never truly pull away until the very end of regulation.
 
Erik Pratt added 11 points and five assists, with Elijah Jamison and Angelo Stuart both chipping in eight.
 
Jayden Stone, who came into the game as the leading scorer in the league at 20.5 ppg, finished with 30 to lead the visitors, his third outing of 30+ this season. Marcus Tankersley added 21 in defeat.
 
"I'd like to give Detroit a lot of credit," Lundy said. "Mike Davis has been doing this a really long time and he was dealt a really bad hand this year. I thought watching all of their games down the stretch – he had seven scholarship guys left – and I thought he put those guys in exactly the positions to give them a chance to be good enough to win in this league. If this season went on, they would have beaten a lot of people. They are good enough to beat anybody on their floor and I thought they proved that tonight."
 
It was an ideal start for the Titans, who came in with little pressure as the No. 11 seed in the event. They grabbed their first lead of the night at 11-8 to force an MKE timeout and didn't stop there, eventually leading by as many as nine on a pair of occasions including 19-10.
 
That was enough to get the Panthers going, scoring seven of the next nine to force a UDM timeout with a two-point lead at 21-17 on a Stuart layup.
 
Detroit Mercy extended its advantage back to seven and Milwaukee trailed until Jamison hit a layup to go ahead 29-28 before the two teams settled into a 35-all scoreline at intermission.
 
The second half had the same script – Milwaukee would try and take control and the Titans would respond. No lead was bigger than three points from the 13-minute mark until the very end, as the game see-sawed back and forth the rest of the way until the Panthers were able to pull out what was their fifth straight victory in the series in the closing minutes.
 
Both offenses finished over 50 percent – Detroit Mercy connected on 50.9 percent (29-of-57) and MKE was at 53.3 percent (32-of-60). The biggest differences came in the paint (MKE the 56-32 advantage) and second-chance (11-2), as both teams had a tough night from long-range (MKE 2-19/DET 9-26).
 
With the victory, the Panthers advance to the quarterfinal round of the 2024 Barbasol Horizon League Championships, where a rematch with Green Bay awaits. The game is scheduled to start at 8 p.m. and is part of a women's/men's HLT doubleheader on campus at the Kress Center. The WBB game is set to tip off at 5:30 p.m. in front of the Panther/Phoenix MBB matchup.