Dave Richman has been stressed in Sioux Falls this week.
And why wouldn’t the Bison head coach be? High stakes, elimination basketball in March brings with it a special kind of intensity and emotion, which can be magnified when you’re leading a team packed with freshmen in important spots up and down your roster. Richman reflected on that after his team knocked out sixth-seeded South Dakota in the quarterfinals on Sunday night.
“The stress that this profession brings, I’m not going to be here for a long time, but that’s perfectly fine,” Richman said.
But, like always, Richman’s stay in Sioux Falls has been just that: a long one.
The team that’s become known as the “baby Bison” reached its fifth straight Summit League Championship game after knocking out South Dakota State in front of a blue-clad Denny Sanford PREMIER Center on Monday night. While Grant Nelson’s league tournament record 22 rebounds against the Jackrabbits will get the rightful headlines, it’s been the youthful Bison that have helped push the program back to within one game of the NCAA Tournament.
In the quarterfinals, it was Tajavis Miller (12 points against the Coyotes) hitting a game-winning runner and making a block on Damani Hayes in the final minute to push NDSU over the line. All that late-game poise came after the jittery start Richman expected from a team with seven players making their Sioux Falls debut.
“I knew Tajavis’ first shot was going to be a six-mile air ball just like it was, we joked about it during the game,” he said on Sunday night. “These guys just have to get comfortable.”
And comfortable is just what they’ve been. Fellow freshman Damari Wheeler-Thomas took the baton in the semifinals against the Jackrabbits, elevating time and time again in the lane to score 17 points, while dishing out a career-high seven assists. And perhaps more impressively, the Elgin, Ill. native was primarily responsible for frustrating Zeke Mayo into a tough shooting night, highlighted by a charge he drew on the all-league guard in the final minutes.
“[Wheeler-Thomas] was absolutely tremendous tonight, what he did on both ends of the floor,” Richman said. “He was begging me to take him out and I just couldn’t take him out, we had to call a timeout to rest him there.”
The Bison have understandably grown into this season, weathering a 3-9 non-conference and 0-2 start to League play to finish third. Miller, Wheeler-Thomas and fellow freshman Jacari White all made big contributions at various points of the League campaign, culminating in a 5-1 record to close out the regular season.
“The fact that we’ve taken these inexperienced guys and freshmen to this point. I’ll be honest and I’m an honest guy: I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again, I don’t know that my stress level can handle it, but at this point I’m really glad that we did it with this group,” he said.
Now, the Bison stare across at a team very much the opposite of what they are from an experience standpoint.
NDSU serves as the final hurdle in Oral Roberts’ quest to add a tournament championship to its undefeated league regular season. And it’s a Golden Eagle core that has thrived in this type of situation before, with Max Abmas, Kareem Thompson, DJ Weaver and Carlos Jurgens cutting down the nets in the Pentagon in 2021 before their Sweet 16 run.
In all likelihood, no player with fewer than three years college experience will take the floor for Paul Mills and ORU on Tuesday night. Abmas talked about after his team won a tight game against St. Thomas in the semifinals.
“The big thing now is we have experience playing at that high level and we understand the task at hand, we’re going to do everything we can to get back to the Big Dance,” he said.
The storylines write themselves as the Bison and Golden Eagles square up with an NCAA Tournament bid on the line for the second time in three seasons.
Nelson and Golden Eagle star Connor Vanover (17 points, 11 rebounds, 5 blocks against the Tommies) are as intriguing a frontcourt match up as there may be in all of mid-major basketball over the next two weeks. Abmas, who moved into second place in career scoring in league history against UST, will look to add to his 2,523 points in keeping alive not only ORU’s perfect season, but also the nation’s longest active Division I winning streak at 16 games.
NDSU did push the Golden Eagles in their most recent encounter, an eight-point ORU win in Tulsa. And in addition to Nelson’s flying form, Boden Skunberg – who caught fire in the second half against SDSU – will pose a challenge to the Golden Eagles, as he’s averaged 20.1 points per game over the last seven contests.
Still, should NDSU upset a historic ORU team, it’ll need the baby Bison to charge once more in the brightest spotlight Miller, Wheeler-Thomas and White have ever faced. To hear Richman say it, that may well work in their favor.
“Sometimes with their youth, they don’t realize what’s going on, they’re just playing basketball,” he said.
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