After senior night win, UWM feels 'crazy dangerous' heading into tourney

The pregame ceremony was a reminder of what could have been during the regular season.

As part of the senior night festivities at UWM Panther Arena, a trio of Milwaukee Panthers seniors walked to the midcourt logo sporting street clothes. All three of them – Seth Hubbard, John Lovelace and Danilo Jovanovich – were supposed to be among the team’s top contributors. Ask some around the Panthers program and they will tell you those were their three best players during the preseason. 

Instead, they lost all three to season-ending injuries. 

"The what-ifs would be nice," head coach Bart Lundy said. "They did look like grown men out there. But it's kind of like that old 'Hoosiers' thing: This is who we are, not who we are not."

Milwaukee took care of business in the ensuing two hours, picking up a 76-65 win over Youngstown State to ensure it avoids the play-in game to the Horizon League tournament next week, but this was never a spot it expected to be in. 

Even still, Lundy likes his chances.

"I think we're kind of crazy dangerous," he said.

The Panthers wrapped up the regular season 8-12 in Horizon play and 12-19 overall. If Youngstown State loses at Green Bay over the weekend, Milwaukee will receive the No. 8 seed in the tournament, which begins next week. If not, the Panthers will be the No. 9 seed. 

There, no doubt, were positive moments from the final couple months of the season, and many of those were on display against the Penguins. Stevie Elam led the Panthers with 19 points, Aaron Franklin’s late senior-year offensive surge continued with 17 points and Chandler Jackson scored in double figures for the sixth straight game with 14 points. 

"If you could make the team a body and each guy the organ, Aaron would be the heart," Lundy said.

The Panthers hope it wasn’t the final night in the arena for some of the seniors who could potentially receive a redshirt. They also don’t want it to be the final home game for the freshman Elam. 

The Michigan native has undoubtedly been one of the top bright spots in a dismal regular season for Milwaukee, averaging 10.5 points and 4.5 rebounds in his first year of college ball. Elam was recruited by Lundy out of high school and has a long-existing relationship with the Panthers staff, but this is the transfer portal era, after all, and all possibilities are on the table. 

Between Elam, Franklin, Jackson and others such as Amar Augillard and Isaiah Dorceus, it isn’t hard to see what the vision was for this Panthers team in 2025-26. We just never got to see it in full bloom after Lovelace suffered a gruesome leg injury in practice and then Hubbard and Jovanovich both had labrum injuries that ended their seasons. With fellow senior Faizon Fields missing a month with an ankle injury and clearly hobbled even after returning, that’s a lot of star power the Panthers have been without. 

But this is (soon, at least) March, and the Panthers have a shot. It would require a true Cinderella run of four victories to win the conference tournament, and they’ve won only four games since Jan. 12. 

They’ve got a shot, though, and that’s all they can ask for.

"This is where you want to be, especially with everything that's happened with that core group," Lundy said. "I feel like I'll go to war with these guys. We're not worried about positions or length. We don't have all the stuff that we might have had, but tonight it came down to having mismatches all over the floor and we took advantage of it.

"So I think we're crazy scary."

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: UWM Panthers basketball beats Youngstown State on senior night