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02-02-2024, 10:56 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-04-2024, 05:16 AM by
81alum.)
As you can tell from my preview, I have been very worried about this game--even more worried than Sunday's. And this is one of those times when my doubts were confirmed.
1) No Stanford woman in the history of Stanford WBB has scored more than 46 points on any floor. At Maples, we have been able to hold some phenomenal players, like Maya Moore and Kelsey Plum, to below their averages. But we were unable to do so on FRESHMAN Juju Watkins. We did try some interesting things. I noticed that in the halfcourt the player guarding her--often Lepolo--would edge to Juju's right, deliberately letting her drive left. We must think that this is Juju's bad side. And as soon as Juju would head left a second player would rotate. So we had a plan. But this plan failed for two reasons First, Juju shot the ball with a hand in her face and still made her shots. In other words, good defense on her did not work. And second, in the first half she frequently made shots in transition before we set up the defense. An inability to get in front of her in transition was deadly. In the fourth quarter we held her to a single basket. However, she also sank 8/10 free throws in the quarter. If we play USC again, in the Pac 12 tournament, I think we can learn some things that may help. But we doubled her, we tried Bosgana, Lepolo, Agara, and even Iriafen against her, and they all picked up too many fouls or were ineffective.
2) I remember Tara talking about some of those amazing one-woman performances on a prior occasion, and that she observed that sometimes you can win a game even when you give up one of those. She was probably referring to a Kelsey Plum game. If one opposing player does all the scoring and your offense spreads it around, you can still come out on top. We could have too, and got it to 2 points with 2 minutes to go--and with Juju's accuracy finally ebbing. The real key to our loss, in my view, was not the 51 point Watkins outpouring, but our own offense's problems. Gottlieb seems to have our number. Last year we lost in a low scoring slugfest at USC and barely won in a low scoring slugfest at Maples. USC had 6'4" Rayah Marshall foul out, 6'2" Kaitlyn Davis foul out, and 6'6" Clarice Akunwafo fouled out. All their tall players fouled out. Everyone taller than Juju Watkins fouled out. There was a reason for that. They were patrolling the paint and doing everything possible to deny the entrance pass and to grab the rebounds--even at a cost of being overly physical. They all fouled out, but they discombobulated Brink and Iriafen who collectively were 10/32. Brink made only 4 baskets and a whole heap of free throws. But the rhythm of our offense was completely out of whack.
3) Statistically the game was close. Both teams shot poorly--33% and 32%. The teams were tied in rebounds. The teams were nearly tied in made and taken free throws. We had 6 more turnovers but 7 more assists.
4) In terms of individual performances, it is hard to evaluate a game like this. How do you judge Brink or Iriafen who were clobbered by three players who fouled out? How do you evaluate Lepolo who expended herself fouling out trying to guard Watkins? Ogden was the only player in positive +/-, and she had 0 points and 4 fouls in 9 minutes. To her credit, Lepolo had 0 turnovers tonight--a big improvement from her last game.
5) Brink had 8 blocks. That is worth noting.
6) I was surrounded by fans who were appalled at the officiating and screamed loudly at the officials for much of the game. This included some who always do this but others who have never seen do this. A few calls that the fans hated I thought could have gone either way, but there were also a number that seemed pretty bad. Watkins reminds me of Plum in that way too--it almost seemed as if the officials were pre-primed to call fouls in her favor. Getting 19 free throws is a lot.
Well, on to UCLA. We need to learn from this, but we also could use some amnesia, to absolutely forget this long enough to concentrate on another very good team. I'm told that Betts was not on the bench for the UCLA/Cal game tonight, and that Sontag needs to leave tomorrow for her national olympic team. But UCLA has three excellent guards, and we did not do so well defending one excellent guard tonight.
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