It was raining threes in Cedar Falls Tuesday night, as the UNI Panthers (2-1) rode a 63% first-half 3-point shooting percentage to an 89-76 win over the Green Bay Phoenix (1-3).

Carson Vis provided an early scoring punch for the Panthers, making each of his first four shots as the Panthers built their early lead. As Vis cooled down, his teammates began catching fire, as Greyson Uelmen and Levi Valdo hit shot after shot to extend UNI’s lead further and further.

“We do a lot of shooting every day, so we trust our guys a lot,” Uelman said.

Green Bay attempted to throw a 3-2 zone at the Panthers to run their shooters off the three point line, but UNI dealt with it swiftly, dissecting the zone off a baseline out of bounds play to force the Phoenix to match back up.

“We had scouted it a little bit, we knew it was coming,” Uelman said. “We had a lot of shooters on the floor, so we shot them out of it pretty quick.”
The Panthers’ seemingly-infallible first-half offense was complemented with an active defensive performance on the perimeter, as UNI blew up Green Bay’s dribble handoffs, denied passing lanes, and refused to give the Phoenix easy baskets in the half court.

“I’m very fortunate to have great assistant coaches,” UNI head coach Kyle Green said, crediting his staff. “They did a great job of preparing the guys on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball.”

The Phoenix had a physicality advantage, and as UNI’s foul trouble slowed down the game in the second half, they used that advantage to cut into the lead, slashing the Panthers’ edge from 20 to 6 thanks to a series of steals and offensive rebounds that led to easy interior baskets.

“Almost every game, we have a refrain, a word, that we use, and for this game, it was ‘Strong,’” Green said. “We had to be strong with the ball, strong with our bodies, we had to be strong in so many different ways…
The Panthers settled back in as the game entered crunch time, though, and they found the stops they needed to force Green Bay into fouls to preserve the clock. UNI hit its free throws down the stretch to put the game away, ending the night with an exclamation point as Tate McCubbin slammed home a game-sealing alley-oop from Uelman.

UNI will now travel to Michigan State to take on the Spartans, who are coming off a win over No. 1 Duke.

“Our practices are really hard, it’s like a high major team,” Miami transfer Isaiah Johnson-Arigu said. “I think the whole team is ready.”

The game is the first of a back-to-back for UNI, as the Panthers are set to take on Oakland the following afternoon.

“In [the[conference tournament], you have to play back-to-backs, right?” Green asked reporters. “That’s one of the reasons we decided to do it. There were times, to be 100% transparent, I’m like, ‘Man, am I sure we want to do this?… but at the end of the day, I just believe it’s going to make us better.”

The win marked UNI’s first over a Division I opponent this season, but the confidence and capability displayed by its shooters will travel if they can get similar performances consistently. Panther head coach Kyle Green acknowledged, though, that they’ll need to find ways to win when their shooters aren’t as red hot as they were on Tuesday.

“I’m going to encourage them to do that every game,” Green said of the team’s shooting performance with a laugh. “We don’t want to be a team a team that’s reliant on making shots to compete, and I think we’ve seen that, because we’ve had some games in here in our exhibitions where we did not, we were 0/15 to start the game, and that affected our defense and affected other things. We need to be consistent regardless of whether the ball goes in or not.”