‘We were just suffocating.’ No. 14 UK routs Rebels. No. 1 South Carolina is up next.
Last weekend, the University of Kentucky women’s basketball team romped to a signature win. In a potential trap game on Thursday, the Wildcats shook off a slow start and rolled to their second straight victory.
Rhyne Howard put together another monster performance and the 14th-ranked Wildcats hammered Mississippi 94-52 in Oxford. Howard scored a game-high 21 points on 8-for-11 shooting. She also had five steals and seven rebounds.
With the win, Kentucky (20-5 overall, 9-4 SEC) kept pace with Texas A&M and Arkansas in a three-way tie for third place in the conference standings.
“I thought we had great ball movement tonight and had some pace. Just really dynamic offensively,” head coach Matthew Mitchell said on the UK Radio Network postgame show. “And then defensively at times, we were just suffocating.”
Early on against the Rebels it appeared UK was experiencing a hangover from its 73-62 upset of No. 6 Mississippi State on Sunday, the program’s first defeat of a top-10 opponent since 2017: The Cats quickly fell behind 7-0 as they missed their first four shots from the field.
But after a frustrated and animated Mitchell called timeout, things quickly changed. Kentucky chipped away at the Rebels’ lead, tying the game 10-10 on Chasity Patterson’s three-pointer. The Cats took the lead for good on Howard’s first bucket of the night. That was part of a 15-0 run that put UK up 20-10 early in the second quarter.
After missing nine of their first 10 shots, the Cats caught fire. They finished 35-for-69 from the field (51 percent). During a stretch that spanned the second and third quarters they outscored the Rebels 41-11. Mississippi (7-19, 0-13) finished 32 percent from the field after hitting its first three shots of the night.
Five Wildcats reached double-figure scoring. Sabrina Haines rebounded nicely from a tough outing against Mississippi State in which she scored just three points on 1-for-7 shooting. Against the Rebels, she hit five of 11 shots and scored 15 points.
“Thank God,” Haines said with a laugh. “It’s just so frustrating because all those shots felt good (against Mississippi State). Sometimes you have those days where they do not fall. … It makes me so happy that all the coaches, especially Coach Mitchell, still have confidence in me. As a player it means so much.”
Patterson scored 15 off the bench and added five assists. Jaida Roper and Blair Green had 10 points each. Roper and Amanda Paschal both had six assists. The Cats had 23 assists as a team.
Kentucky outrebounded the Rebels 40-26 and forced 21 turnovers.
Next up for the Wildcats is a major opportunity to boost their NCAA Tournament profile when they host No. 1 South Carolina in Memorial Coliseum on Sunday. The Gamecocks (26-1, 13-0) are two games clear of second-place Mississippi State in the SEC standings. On Thursday they won their 20th straight game, topping LSU 63-48.
South Carolina beat Kentucky 99-72 in Columbia to open the SEC schedule on Jan. 2. But Haines said this is not the same UK team that struggled to keep up with the Gamecocks.
“This team is maturing every game, we’re still not to our final form,” she said. “We’re so much better since the first time we played South Carolina. We work together so much better, so we’re excited about that.”
Three South Carolina freshmen started that game and each reached double-figure scoring. The Gamecocks had this season’s No. 1 recruiting class in the nation according to ESPN’s rankings. They’re led in scoring by 6-foot-5 freshman forward Aliyah Boston, who averages 13.2 points per game. Boston had 14 points and six rebounds against the Cats in January.
Next game
No. 1 South Carolina at No. 14 Kentucky
2 p.m. Sunday (ESPN2)
This story was originally published February 20, 2020 at 10:44 PM.
