Las Vegas • The riffs of Pat Benetar’s 1979 rock hit “Heartbreaker” blasted across the hardwood court inside the Mandalay Bay Events Center. Coach Lynne Roberts wanted her team to play like that music Friday in Utah’s quarterfinal game against top-seeded Oregon in the Pac-12 Women’s Basketball Tournament: hard and fast and with complete disregard for the outcome.
“You’re a heartbreaker, dream maker, love taker, don’t you mess around with me,” Benetar sings. That’s what the Utes wanted to be.
Instead, the Utes were the ones who had left the court with broken hearts. Oregon, ranked No. 3 in the nation, ended their season with a 79-59 loss. Worse, the Ducks did it by beating Utah at its own game.
Utah scored the third most 3-pointers in Pac-12 play this season with an average of 8.27 per game. The team that scored the most? Yep, Oregon with 9.10.
The Ducks padded that stat Friday. They piled up eight straight 3-pointers in the second quarter — accounting for all but two of their made field goals in the period — in rallying from a 19-16 deficit at the start of the period to take a 45-29 lead into the half. The long balls came from five different Oregon players, but no one scored more of them than Sabrina Ionescu. The poster girl for women’s college basketball as the only player, male or female, to record 2,000 points, 1,000 assists and 1,000 rebounds in his or her career, she hit three 3s in the span.
Ionescu finished with game-highs in points, assists and rebounds: 19, eight and 11.
All things considered, though, the Utes were taking this rejection rather well. They’re an extremely young group, only losing two steadfast players, Daneesha Provo and Kiana Moore, to graduation. Their two leading scorers are freshmen: shooting guard Brynna Maxwell and center Lola Pendande.
Those two along with sophomore point Dru Gylten again paced Utah against Oregon. Maxwell, the Pac-12 leader in 3-point shooting percentage, made three on her way to 12 points. That added on to the school freshman 3-point record she set in the first round, bringing the final tally to 83. Pendande scored a team-high 15 points and had 10 rebounds and Gylten added nine points along with four each of assists and rebounds.
This story will be updated.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/3avdeNK
Post a Comment