Correspondent photo / David Dermer. YSU guard Jason Nelson tries to go up and under the basket while being defended by Cleveland State's Dayan Nessah on Saturday at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland.

CLEVELAND — A cloud of frustration is hanging over the Youngstown State men’s basketball team, as the Penguins are stuck in a seemingly endless cycle that continues to drag on.

YSU dropped its seventh straight Horizon League game on Saturday, losing once again by the smallest of margins to Cleveland State 80-78 at the Wolstein Center in Cleveland.

“We’re going to continue to work at this as hard as we can, work until this thing gets headed back in the right direction,” YSU head coach Ethan Faulkner said. “We’ll continue to tweak, continue to make adjustments as we go through. I still believe this thing can get moving in the right direction, but we need some positivity. We need something to go our way. We need to catch a break. But how you do that is you create your own breaks by the way you go about your business in practice and how you play the game.”

In four of its seven league losses, the Penguins (9-11, 2-7 Horizon) had a chance to either tie or win on its last one or two possessions, coming up short each time.

That was the case again on Saturday against the Vikings (6-14, 2-7 Horizon).

“We’re definitely frustrated. We just keep losing by one or two points,” senior guard Jason Nelson said. “The main thing, we just want to stay connected in the locker room. We just want to be together. … We just gotta play all 40 minutes. We play all 40 minutes, and we don’t take no plays off. That’s the only thing that’s keeping us down.”

Cleveland State led by as many as six points twice over the final few minutes after going on an 8-0 run to pull ahead. But YSU managed to cut the deficit down to one, and after Chevalier Emery went 1-for-2 at the free-throw line, the Penguins had their chance with about 16 seconds left.

With no timeouts left, YSU pushed the ball up the floor. The Penguins got a look for Tae Blackshear in the corner for three, but it rimmed out. Jaiden Haynes got the offensive rebound, but his putback from along the baseline went over the basket as the final seconds ticked off the clock.

“It’s a special-situation play that we basically work on three or four times a week,” Faulkner said. “We executed to perfection, stood there wide open and again, we just couldn’t get the ball to go in the basket.”

That sequence was emblematic of YSU’s issues for most of the afternoon.

The Penguins won the rebounding battle (38-29) and dominated on the offensive glass (20-4), but didn’t have anything to show for it. YSU finished with just nine second-chance points.

“If you look at the box score, it’s pretty remarkable,” Faulkner said. “We basically dominate every statistical category. We shoot 34 more shots than them, we outrebound them by 10, we turn them over 15 times — basically the only statistical category we didn’t win was the free-throw line and that’s because of our discipline to guard without fouling.”

All five of the Penguins’ starters finished in double figures, led by Cris Carroll, who gave YSU a spark to start the second half, scoring 14 of his team-high 21 points as YSU built a nine-point lead. He finished with a double-double with 11 rebounds.

But Carroll was forced to sit most of the final few minutes with cramps, so he wasn’t on the floor during those last few sequences for the Penguins.

“He was cramping. He couldn’t play,” Faulkner said. “That was obviously detrimental to our team. He had it going offensively. He tried to go out there and play, but basically his leg couldn’t move.”

After holding the Vikings to 28 points at halftime — which was tied thanks to YSU ending the first half on a 7-0 run — YSU gave up 52 points in the second half, as CSU shot 66.7% from the floor, which included knocking down eight 3-pointers.

The rest of the Vikings’ points came at the free-throw line, where they shot 30-of-39, attempting 23 more free throws than the Penguins. Dayan Nessah led CSU with 26 points, 15 of which came at the free-throw line.

“We just gotta execute better on the defensive end of the floor,” Faulkner said. “We can’t continuously get backed up. We can’t continuously get slipped to the basket. … Too many breakdowns continuously happening. We hold them to 28 points in the first half, you have 52 in the second half. A lot of that’s our discipline to execute and discipline to defend.”

The Penguins return home for three straight games, which starts Thursday at 6:30 p.m. against Green Bay at Zidian Family Arena.