Loyola showed Thursday night it has a team Horizon League opponents will want to avoid in the upcoming conference tournament.
The Ramblers led most of the way and trailed by just one point with two minutes left before falling 74-67 to league-leading Wisconsin-Milwaukee before 2,682 fans in the Gentile Center.
Senior guard DaJuan Gouard led all scorers with 22 points and 6-foot-7-inch sophomore forward Blake Schilb added 19 as the teams locked in a battle in a tourney-like atmosphere.
Milwaukee (18-5, 11-2 Horizon) survived because it crashed everybody to the boards and outrebounded Loyola 49-31. Its offensive rebounds produced 31 second-chance points.
Substituting freely and outscoring Loyola 26-7 off the bench, the Panthers exerted intense pressure on Loyola’s offense. This paid off, UWM coach Bruce Pearl said, in the second half when Loyola (7-16, 5-8) hit only 26 percent of its shots and no baskets after Anthony Smith put it ahead 63-57 with 7:53 left.
“We faced pressure,” Gouard said, “but we also got out of our offense. We went east and west [dribbling] too much instead of north and south.”
Schilb explained the rebounding battle this way: “We’re a young team. We stressed the need to box them out because they all crash. But we got too excited and forgot to do this.”
In the Panthers’ late-game rally, they needed some extraordinary plays such as the one Chicago-area natives Mark Pancratz from Schaumburg and Boo Davis from Marshall pulled off with six minutes to play to earn UWM a 64-63 lead it never relinquished.
Pancratz, a reserve who scored 10 points, leaped high near the sideline and speared an errant pass that sent him flying out of bounds. But before his sneakers hit the floor, he directed a slick touch pass into the waiting hands of Davis, who drilled a three-point basket.
“It was a great pass,” Davis said. “That basket upped our confidence.”
Loyola coach Jim Whitesell, who lauded his players for their hustle, called Pancratz’s pass and Davis’ shot “a big play that made them more aggressive.”
