BUZZER BEATER
Sullivan's jumper ends regional classic
BY MATT FREY
SPORTS EDITOR
In a contest where shot-making became the big story, the Medford Raiders were thankful Saturday they got the last attempt.
A shade over two minutes after Fox Valley Lutheran standout Josiah Butler tied the WIAA Division 2 regional final at 66-66 with his seventh 3-pointer and 39th point of the game, Medford’s senior point guard Joey Sullivan had the ultimate answer by dribbling out the final 1:10 and then coldly knocking down a step-back 15-foot jumper at the buzzer to give the Raiders an exhilarating 68-66 win, back-to-back regional championships and, to those who were there or watching back home, a moment they won’t soon forget.
“That is my shot,” Sullivan said. “I’ve been practicing that shot all the time. In practice, everybody says, ‘there’s Joe doing that step-back, pull-up jumper from the mid-range.’ And it’s deadly. To get that shot, I cre- See REGIONAL CHAMPS on page 4
Medford's Joey Sullivan puts up the buzzer-beating shot that knocks out top-seeded Fox Valley Lutheran 68-66 in Saturday's WIAA Division 2 regional final and sends the Raiders to a sectional semifinal in Antigo Thursday against GNC rival Rhinelander.
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ated a lot of space. I had it wide open and it was smooth right off the fingertips. I was like, ‘that’s in.’” Running down the clock and letting Sullivan find his shot has been a successful strategy for Medford at the end of about a half-dozen first halves the past two seasons. To calmly kill the final 2:05, prevent Butler and the Foxes from getting another shot and execute the way the Raiders and Sullivan did in a seasonsaving situation on a number-one seed’s home floor obviously took it to a new level.
“For him to come out and say, ‘this is my game right here.’ That’s what you want,” said Medford head coach Ryan Brown. “That play, I don’t really know how to describe it. We haven’t had a buzzer-beater like that. You can’t really describe a win like that, on the road in a tough environment and making that shot.”
“We kinda take for granted how good of a guard we have in Joey where he can just dribble it out and doesn’t get the fivesecond call,” said Logan Baumgartner, who scored 24 points to lead the Raiders along with Sullivan’s 25 points. “He makes the right passes at the right time and then when he can drive, lose his defender and make the shot, it’s something you dream of.”
Not much earlier, it didn’t look like the game was going to come down to the last shot. The fourth-seeded Raiders (20-6) held a three-possession lead from the start of the second half, all the way up until there was 3:55 left. That’s when the game took a sudden and drastic turn.
With Medford leading 63-52 and Baumgartner having just missed a 3-point shot that might’ve been the dagger, Butler, who was up to 31 points at the time, drew all of Medford’s defensive attention to the left side and found a wide-open Isaac Knoll for a 3-pointer from the right corner. The Foxes got a stop and Butler scored on a runout off a loose ball and, just like that, the lead was down to six.
Sullivan went to the rim at the end of a press break but his awkward shot around the Foxes’ 6-6 Nicholas Kraftzenk fell short. Knoll got an open look after a shot fake and drilled another right-corner 3 to make it 63-60 with 3:05 left. Sullivan made one of two free throws with 2:43 left, but Butler got inside and converted a three-point play to cut Medford’s lead to 64-63 with 2:24 left. Baumgartner sank two free throws seven seconds later, but back came Butler with a cold-blooded 3 over Medford’s Brigham Kelley and Baumgartner from the left wing to cap Fox Valley Lutheran’s 14-3 run that covered less than two minutes. Butler made seven of his 10 3-point attempts and 15 of 23 shots overall in the game.
“At practice, coach Brown was telling he’s ‘a pretty good’ shooter and all of a sudden he just starts making them all and we couldn’t really do much about it,” Kelley said. “We had a hand in his face and he made some tough shots. Credit to him. He couldn’t get much better.”
The Raiders didn’t exactly intend to run the clock down from there. But about 45 seconds into a patient possession, Brown called a timeout with 1:19 left. Out of the timeout, Tanner Hraby took a probing drive toward the rim, but he passed the ball out. It got to Sullivan at the 1:10 mark and, to the Raiders’ good fortune, the Foxes allowed him to run it out with minimal pressure.
“I wasn’t sure what they were going to do, that was the tough part,” Brown said. “Do we just attack? We know we’re in the bonus. Do we try to get a lead and then kind of put that pressure on them and get a rebound and make free throws? Or, do we hold it? And again, that’s where it comes down to those guys making a really good decision.”
“I’d dribble, dribble back and they weren’t pressing,” Sullivan said. “I’d keep on glancing at the ref. I get a onecount, maybe two and then I was out. They never really tried to make a move, try to steal or try to foul. So I was like, ‘I could dial this down.’ I was looking at (the clock), 13, 12. I was sizing my guy up. 10, 9, looking at it. Then I get to about 7 and I start making my move and I probably shot that with about 1 on the clock.
“I had a lot of people ask me were you scared? I mean I shot it, it went in and it was like, ‘that’s game.’ I just took off to the other end of the court, I didn’t know where I was going, I was just running.”
Brown said what made the moment even sweeter was that Sullivan passed up a similar shot in crunch time in last year’s 51-50 loss to Rice Lake in the WIAA Division 2 sectional semifinal and it had bothered him ever since. Saturday, he got another shot and didn’t let it get away.
“For a sophomore like Tanner to drive it, get it deep but make a good decision to throw it out and then put it in the hands of your senior point guard was great,” Brown said. “Joe did a great job burning the clock and you knew he wanted the ball in his hands. For him to make the play that he did just speaks volumes about him and his confidence and how much this meant to him. It’s something he and this group will never forget and it just speaks to their mental toughness and just how much their will to win was tonight.”
What a game
While the ending will be most remembered, the rest of the game was about as good as it gets too if you were a Medford fan.
In front of a loud and packed house, the Raiders got off to a quick start as Baumgartner hit his first three shots –– two 3s and a 15-foot pull-up jumper –– to give Medford an 8-0 lead.
“(Friday) night I didn’t shoot the way I wanted to,” Baumgartner said. “Tonight I just wanted to focus on having good form, finishing with follow through, snapping the wrists. Tonight I got some open looks and they were going in.”
After a timeout, Fox Valley Lutheran (21-5) jumped right back into the fray with a 9-0 run that included five points and an assist from Butler. Sullivan countered with a three-point play and backand- forth the teams went. Butler’s 3 gave
the Foxes a 20-18 lead, but Tanner Hraby tied it with a bucket, Sullivan drained a triple and, from there, the Raiders never trailed.
For the second time in the half, Charlie Kleist took an offensive charge and then he got his own rebound on the offensive end and scored for a five-point lead. Kleist continued to give Medford big minutes off the bench with nine points and six boards.
“I feel like I’ve been getting more confi dent in the post and around the rim,” Kleist said. “When I got stops on defense it just gives me more confidence to go down and score on offense.”
The lead hit 10 at 32-22 when Baumgartner hustled to dig out a loose ball on the defensive end that wound up getting flipped to Sullivan who beat Butler to the rim for a contested lay-in. Baumgartner’s bonus throws with 3:07 left bumped the margin to 34-23 before the Raiders settled for a 36-28 halftime lead.
Hraby attacked the rack and got the first hoop of the second half to push the lead back to 10. Butler’s 3-pointer got the lead down to 40-33, but Sullivan swished
a 3-pointer to get the lead back to 10. The lead stayed between eight and 12 points before the Foxes made their swift, late run.
“It’s really what you play the game for,” Kleist said. “You don’t really want it to be that close, but when it is close it’s all that much more exciting. It’s really fun. You just can’t replicate it.”
“It was definitely about making free throws,” said Baumgartner, who was six for six at the line. As a team, Medford
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was 14 of 16. “We made our free throws. It was just about staying calm, knowing what we could do. Just hit shots. During the game I felt like we didn’t get enough calls. There were some calls that could’ve went our way, but we just stayed calm, knew what we could do and it turned out.”
Hraby added 10 points for Medford as only four players hit the scoring column. Medford head basketball coach Ryan Brown hands off the WIAA Division 2 regional championship plaque to his players during the celebration following Saturday’s 68-66 win at Fox Valley Lutheran.
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Sullivan tied Kleist with six rebounds, Baumgartner finished with five and Chubs Guden had three. Hraby had four assists, while Baumgartner had three.
Medford shot 46% from the field (23 of 50) and was eight of 17 on 3s. The Foxes shot 50% (26 of 52) and were 10 of 22 from long range. But Fox Valley Lutheran was just four of seven from the line, which wound up being crucial.
Guden was the primary defender on Butler, but with Medford switching on ball screens and having to pay so much attention to him, it was a team effort to keep the Foxes at 66 points, even if their star was unstoppable in the second half, when he scored 23 of his points. Knoll added 11 points.
“I didn’t think we played bad defense on (Butler),” Brown said. “I thought we made him make contested shots. But he just kept knocking down shots.”
“We knew Butler was good,” Sullivan said. “I give him a lot of credit. He averaged 25 and he came out and dropped 39. We knew he was an attacker. We knew he was an in-and-out shooter but I didn’t think he’d be hitting five, six stepbacks over everyone’s heads. I mean Chubs guarded him as good as anyone can ask for. We gave him a task. We stopped him at times. He played as good as anyone could. Chubs is our best on-ball defender by far. It really was our whole defense working together.”
“It’s amazing,” Kelley said. “At the end, when we were shooting free throws it was so loud you couldn’t hear a thing. The environment was awesome. It’s great to come out with a win here.”
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