Asked about his team’s approach at the start of the second half of last night’s Centennial Conference playoff game, Muhlenberg men’s basketball standout Malique Killing replied, “We were going to continue to do what we’d been doing.”
Maybe he should have sai
d, “We were going to do what Gettysburg had just done.”
The Mules’ dramatic 45-43 win consisted of two similar halves: In the first half, Gettysburg scored 31 points and held Muhlenberg to 20.7-percent shooting. In the second half, Muhlenberg scored 31 points and held Gettysburg to 20.8-percent shooting.
Muhlenberg’s second-half defense enabled it to come back from a 17-point deficit at the break to win. And while big comebacks are nothing new for the Mules – they overcame 16-point deficits to beat both Ursinus and McDaniel this season – two things were unique about this one.
It’s one thing to erase a big deficit in a high-scoring game; the scores of the Ursinus and McDaniel games were 75-73 and 83-82, respectively. But to do so in a game with limited possessions is much more difficult. The Bullets were successful in shortening the game by taking time off the clock on every trip down the floor, but Muhlenberg still had just enough time to complete the comeback.
And the game marked the first time the Mules trailed by 17 at halftime and came back to win since Feb. 6, 1991, when they trailed Lebanon Valley 41-24 at the break and pulled out a 71-65 victory.
That was before the Centennial Conference was born, and also before Malique Killing was born.
Other than the comeback and Killing’s game-winning shot with seven-tenths of a second remaining, the game stood out for its historically low score. The lowest-scoring CC playoff game ever was the Mules’ lowest-scoring postseason game since a 45-41 win against La Salle in the 1947 MAC championship game.
The 14 points the Mules scored in the first half were their fewest in a half since netting only 12 in the second half of a 48-43 loss to Dickinson in 1983.
The 12 points the Mules allowed in the second half were the second-fewest in team history in the shot-clock era, surpassed (if that’s the right word) only by a 10-point effort in a 67-40 win against McDaniel three years ago.
And while it may not have been the most artistic basketball game ever played, the Mules – who have lost CC playoff games by scores of 87-79, 85-79 and 86-77 – will gladly take the win into tomorrow night’s semifinal game at Franklin & Marshall, knowing that at this time of year, you play whatever style of game is required to get to the next day.
