What We Learned in Cal's Overtime Victory vs. Miami

Bears showed their toughness again and freshman Jeremiah Wilkinson displayed a sense of humor afterward

Rytis Petraitis greets Cal's fans after Saturday's victory / D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images

This is hardly a news bulletin, but Cal is not a great basketball team, as coach Mark Madsen suggested after the Bears’ 98-94 overtime defeat of Miami on Saturday evening.

We’re never surprised that Madsen, a man who sees the glass as three-quarters full, offers unqualified praise of his team. That’s part of his personality and his approach to coaching his players.

The Bears (11-9, 4-5 ACC) have won three in a row, but they are a flawed team, uneven defensively, inconsistent shooting from the perimeter and prone to lapses that provide openings for the opposition.

But we learned two things on Saturday. First, and we’ve seen this before, is that this team is tough. More on that later.

And second, we discovered that freshman guard Jeremiah Wilkinson, who scored a career-high 30 points, has a sense of humor.

Wilkinson, 6-foot-1 and strong beyond his years, is a left-hander who at this stage in his development is clearly more comfortable going to his left on dribble drives to the basket.

He did so repeatedly against the Hurricanes on a night when his perimeter shot was not falling. Wilkinson was 1 for 10 on 3-point attempts, but he converted 9 of his other 12 shots — eight of them on drives or layups.

He scored four times on an aggressive drives to the rim in a span of five possessions in the final 5 minutes of regulation, and on three of them were on drives to the left.

Wilkinson changed up once, going to his right to find a path to the hoop. But the Miami defense never did figure out that the southpaw much preferred going left.

Asked afterward when an opponent might start to figure this out, Wilkinson smiled and waved off all responsibility.

“That’s up to the other team,” he said. “I may favor my left. I’m happy to go right, but my goal is to go left every time because that’s what I’m best at.”

As far as the Bears’ determination to win even things weren’t going smoothly, they got that done with another example of their tenacity. Miami had lost eight in a row and 15 of 16 games, but played free and easy.

For the second game in a row, Cal played without top scorer Andre Stojakovic. He missed Wednesday’s game against Florida State because of illness, then sat out Saturday with a hip injury.

The Bears won both games without him, beating a 13-win FSU team 77-68 behind double-digit scoring from five players. Besides Wilkinson’s big game against Miami, DJ Campbell delivered a season-best 22 points.

But no one would have been surprised had Cal come apart after Miami’s Matthew Cleveland made a game-tying 3-pointer with 1 second left in regulation to delay the Bears’ victory by forcing overtime.

“Don’t panic,” Wilkinson said of the message between the end of the second half and the start of OT. “They don’t have that many wins, but they’re going to come out and play hard. 

“Don’t let us be the team that they beat. Keep playing hard no matter if they’re hitting shots or not. At the end of the game they made runs but we weathered the storm and in overtime we took care of business.”

The Bears play on the road for the only time in a span of six games when they visit SMU (15-5, 6-3) on Wednesday for a 6 p.m. PT tipoff.