Suki Wiggs was in the zone Thursday night.
Unfortunately for the UAA men's basketball team, so was Middle Tennessee State.
Wiggs turned in a marvelous 35-point effort -- one of the highest-scoring performances in the 38 years of the Great Alaska Shootout -- but Middle Tennessee State's zone defense carried the Blue Raiders to a dramatic 75-72 first-round win over the Seawolves.
Sparked by their 1-3-1 zone defense, the Blue Raiders (2-1) opened up a 15-point lead with seven minutes left.
But as is their habit when they take on Division I teams at the Shootout, the Division II Seawolves roared back.
With an Alaska Airlines Center crowd of 2,478 cheering them on, the Seawolves went on a 19-4 run that gave them a 66-64 lead with 2:13 left. The Blue Raiders responded with six straight points but didn't cement the win until the very end.
"I'm proud of our resiliency," UAA coach Rusty Osborne said. "I thought we gave a great effort."
Wiggs pumped in 11 points during UAA's big run to finish with the 13th-most points in Shootout history, a position he shares with three others, including former UAA great Jason Kaiser. The tournament's single-game scoring record of 43, set in 2009, belongs to Washington State's Klay Thompson.
"He was special tonight," MTSU coach Kermit Davis said.
Wiggs drilled NBA-length 3-pointers with defenders in his face and slashed through traffic in the lane for layups. He hit 11 of 20 shots from the field, including 6 of 10 from 3-point range.
"I felt kind of hot tonight," said Wiggs, whose attempt to send the game to overtime -- a 40-foot shot at the buzzer -- bounced off the backboard.
MTSU's 1-3-1 zone defense made UAA work hard and long for most of its shots. This season's shorter shot clock made the zone even more effective, forcing the Seawolves into a couple of shot clock violations and hurrying them into a number of shots as the clock approached zero.
"It's been really good to us the last seven or eight years," Davis said of the zone. "It's won a lot of games for us."
The latest win came down to the wire. MTSU's Perrin Buford, coming off a Monday knee injury and wearing a big brace, scored 18 points and committed a foul with 3.6 seconds left that helped seal the victory for his team.
With MTSU leading 73-70 and Wiggs waiting for the referee's signal to in-bound the ball, Buford fouled UAA's Spencer Svejcar.
Had the Seawolves gotten the ball in play, they would have looked for a 3-pointer and a chance to tie the game. Instead, Svejcar went to the line for a pair of free throws that kept the Blue Raiders in the lead by a point.
UAA fouled immediately, and MTSU's Giddy Potts made both foul shots for the game's final points.
"We did not plan on fouling," Davis said.
Call it a happy accident instead, one that helped keep the Seawolves from pulling off another Shootout upset. UAA is 36-75 in tournament history.
Davis is well-aware of UAA's giant-killing ways at the Shootout, and he said he cautioned his players not to get too overconfident.
"I told them it was gonna be like a road game in our league," he said.
MTSU pressed much of the game and was able to stay in its zone thanks to UAA's inability to knock down shots -- the Seawolves missed 21 of 32 shots from 3-point range and shot 39.3 percent from the field (although they were much better in the second half -- 46.7 -- than they were in the first half -- 30.8).
But the Seawolves made some huge shots, including a couple in the run that put them back in the game. Among them were a deep NBA 3-pointer by Wiggs, a gritty putback by Svejcar that was UAA's third shot of the possession and a 3-pointer by Diante Mitchell from the corner in front of UAA's bench. Many of the buckets came with the shot clock winding down.
"They made some hard shots at the end of the clock," Davis said.
Svejcar finished with 14 points and three steals, Mitchell added 11 points, six rebounds and four steals and Corey Hammell had nine rebounds and for the Seawolves, who return to the court Friday for a 2 p.m. game against Drexel.
"We have some pretty good days ahead of us," Osborne said. "We'll start again at 2 o'clock tomorrow and get back on the horse."