Phoenix rising: Green Bay’s ‘D’ cools Penguins

Freshman Vytas Sulskis scored 19 points, but only six in the second half.

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Good thing Wisconsin-Green Bay can rely on its defense at home.

The Phoenix held an opponent to under 40 percent shooting for the fourth time in the last five home games in a 66-58 win over Youngstown State Saturday.

“We didn’t play real well offensively at times but I think once again — for the most part — we played pretty close to 40 minutes of really good defense,” Green Bay coach Tod Kowalczyk said. “When you hold a team to 38 percent shooting on the game I look at that as ‘Hey, we’re guarding, we’re doing the things we need to win.’ Defense is what’s getting it’s done and the guys buy into that.”

Ryan Tillema scored 14 points to lead a balanced Wisconsin-Green Bay attack, which included 11 points and nine rebounds from Mike Schachtner and 11 points from Rahmon Fletcher.

The Phoenix (11-8, 5-4 Horizon League) went on a 17-2 run straddling the first and second half to pull away. Green Bay has won nine of the last 10 meetings in the series.

Freshman Vytas Sulskis led Youngstown State (7-13, 3-7) with 19 points and six rebounds. Byron Davis scored 16 points and Jack Liles added 12 off the bench.

But Sulskis only scored six points in the second half as the Penguins failed to rally.

“[Sulskis] is a freshman and I’m not sure what happens with freshmen at times,” Youngstown State coach Jerry Slocum said. “He was very, very aggressive in the first half. In the second half he wasn’t quite as a aggressive as we would like, but that’s part of the learning curve.”

Youngstown State led by as many as nine in the first half, but Green Bay cut the deficit to 33-31 with a 7-0 spurt that was capped by Uriel Segura’s running 3-pointer at the buzzer.

“I think it helped a lot. We were kind of flat it seemed like in the first half and especially when Uriel hit that 3 right at halftime it kind of gave us a little momentum going into the second half,” Tillema said. “It was just a big shot.”

The game was tight throughout, but the Phoenix never relinquished the lead after a free throw by Tevah Morris at the 18:32 mark of the second half put Green Bay ahead 36-35.

The Penguins trimmed the lead to 62-58 with 42 seconds left, but Fletcher and Terry Evans combined to hit eight straight free throws in the final 1:17.

It was the second straight come-from-behind victory for Green Bay after the Phoenix also rallied from a halftime deficit to defeat Cleveland State. Before the last two games Green Bay was 0-7 when trailing at the half.

The Penguins, who came in as the league’s worst free throw shooting team, were 12-for-12 from the line in the first half and made 16-of-17 attempts overall.

But the stellar free shooting wasn’t enough because of Youngstown State’s poor shooting performance from the field, combined with 17 turnovers.

The Penguins travel to Loyola Thursday night at 8.