Kentucky women’s basketball puts ‘very trying week’ to bed with rout of Georgia.
At the end of a difficult three-game week that opened with losses at Ole Miss and to No. 3 Texas, Kenny Brooks leaned on “the importance of the bounce-back,” to help guide the eighth-ranked Kentucky women’s basketball team to a dominant 84-55 victory over Georgia on Sunday.
The victory in front of an announced crowd of 5,625 in Memorial Coliseum, was Kentucky’s largest over the Bulldogs in series history, and marked a necessary return to form for several Wildcats, including starters Amelia Hassett and Clara Strack, plus freshman guard Lexi Blue.
“Monday, I felt like we, for the most part of the game, we were the better basketball team,” Brooks said. “We let it slip away. And give credit to Ole Miss, they won the basketball game. Thursday, Texas is really good. And if we want to get to that level, we have to do certain things. And we talked about that.”
Brooks called it “a very trying week,” for the team, which he noted would receive a deserved day off Monday ahead of Thursday’s road trip to Missouri. From not being able to finish against the Rebels, to struggling with foul trouble and cold shooting against Texas, not to mention Kentucky’s continued efforts to improve upon rebounding, Brooks spoke with his players Sunday about “being a fist,” as opposed to five individual fingers working to handle business alone.
“When we’re all connected, we’re a really good basketball team,” Brooks said after the Wildcats improved to 20-4 overall and 9-3 in Southeastern Conference play. “Because we can go a lot of different directions to be able to score.”
Hassett, who has been dealing with illness and struggled to score in UK’s previous three matchups, was the first Wildcat to put points on the board — a 3-pointer in the first 70 seconds. She went on to finish with 14 points on 5-of-9 shooting, including four makes from beyond the arc. Hassett also contributed six rebounds, three assists, three blocks and one steal.
“You have to come out every game and play,” said Hassett, who totaled seven points in UK’s previous three games despite averaging 9.8 per contest this season. “Obviously, I haven’t been playing as well as I’ve wanted to for coach Brooks and obviously for the team. So just coming out today, just locked in focused and just, yeah, just playing with confidence.”
Hassett was also switched onto Georgia freshman Trinity Turner for the second half, after Turner scored 20 points in the first 20 minutes. Brooks complimented Hassett’s defensive performance, which limited the freshman to just two points in the second half.
“We needed this game,” Brooks said. “We needed this game, and we’ve got some kids who really needed to see the ball go through the basket. Amelia is one of them. She might sound like she’s possessed when she starts talking, but, you know, she’s had a long week. She’s been really under the weather, and I’m proud of her the way that she’s battled all week, just to be available for us.”
Hassett, whose voice was noticeably raspy during the postgame press conference, was joined in double-figure scoring by each of her fellow starters. Strack, who Brooks said “had a really good second half,” added 14 points, six rebounds, three assists, three blocks and one steal. All-America point guard Georgia Amoore led UK in scoring with 21 points, and added seven assists. Graduate guard Dazia Lawrence finished with 15 points and five rebounds. Junior forward Teonni Key added 14 points and 14 rebounds for her third straight double-double, plus four assists and one block.
“You cannot let it linger,” Brooks said. “You have one bad game, it can’t turn into two that turns into three, and turns into four. You have to turn the page. And what’s what we did. We locked in, we focused. We took accountability for our actions on Monday and Thursday, and we saw, we were very aware of what we needed to rectify, and we did that tonight, and we came out and we saw a lot of great things that were really reminiscent of what we were doing before those two games.”
Against Georgia (10-16, 2-10), Brooks played nine of his 11 healthy and available players; seven of those players scored at least one point. While the Wildcats leaned heavily on their starting five as usual, foul trouble for Key and Lawrence created a need for reserves to step up and produce.
Freshman center Clara Silva scored one point and grabbed four rebounds, but blocked three shots to move into the all-time Kentucky freshman top 10, tied for seventh with 25 blocks this season. Junior guard Cassidy Rowe clocked nearly 12 1/2 minutes and, per Brooks, “did a really good job of steadying the ship,” while on the floor.
However, no reserve took on more responsibility against the Bulldogs than Blue, who played a career-high 24 minutes and 35 seconds, and finished with five points on 2-of-3 shooting, including 1-of-2 from the 3-point line, and three rebounds and one assist. Brooks said that, in light of the team’s recent rebounding struggles, Blue did “a really good job” of being “more of a force for helping the rebounders.”
Sunday marked just the 17th appearance for the 6-foot-2 Blue, who was the first substitution into the game, a spot recently belonging to Saniah Tyler. A recent decrease in production from the junior, combined with a strong week of practice from Blue, earned the former top-40 national prospect the chance to demonstrate her growth.
“We need production, positive production, when we go to the bench,” Brooks said. “And ST had done a good job for us earlier, but she has struggled the last few games. And Lexi is the epitome of not giving up, even though her minutes were sporadic, crazy, non-existent, existent, you know, she’s always in the gym, working, getting extra in. She wants it really, really bad, and so, she had a really good week of practice, a really good week of practice. And it was by design we were going to go with her first off the bench, and give her an opportunity.”
The Wildcats won the battle of the boards for the first time since their Jan. 30 win over then-No. 22 Alabama, pulling in 40 rebounds to the Bulldogs’ 33. Brooks said the team “didn’t do anything different — we didn’t go out there with rebounding drills and dummies, or go to coach (Mark) Stoops and borrow some football helmets and shoulder pads and any of that stuff.”
However, he did have a discussion about how to bounce back better going forward, particularly within a league that boasts several of the power conferences’ top rebounding teams.
“At this point in the year, you cannot do a whole lot about it,” Brooks said. “Other than watch it, understand it, talk about it and then fix it. And then today, I thought we did a really good job. We had our rebounders available for the most part. (Hassett is) a very important piece to that because she gets some of the long rebounds, and we rectified it. But it’s going to be a challenge again on Thursday, it’s going to be a challenge again next Sunday. The SEC is a rebounding conference.”
Postseason stakes
Kentucky’s Thursday matchup against Missouri (13-14, 2-10 SEC), as will be the case with its three remaining regular-season games after that, holds serious postseason seeding implications, as the Wildcats try to hold on to the fourth and final double-bye for the SEC Tournament.
UK sits in fourth place in the SEC behind third-ranked Texas, No. 4 South Carolina and No. 5 LSU. Texas and South Carolina each have one conference loss as a result of splitting their series, and LSU suffered its second loss of the season on Sunday, a 65-58 defeat to the Longhorns in Austin; the Tigers had previously lost to South Carolina in late January.
The Wildcats will host LSU this Sunday, welcome No. 15 Tennessee to Lexington on Feb. 27 and travel to South Carolina for the regular-season finale on March 2.
The NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee named UK a No. 4 seed in its first preview of the top 16 seeds for the NCAA Tournament, revealed Sunday; the Wildcats are one of six SEC teams listed among those that would, at this point in the season, earn hosting privileges for the first and second rounds of the tournament. When asked how much time he spends thinking about that and how important it is to him, Brooks said, “We don’t.”
“I haven’t seen it,” Brooks said. “I haven’t even seen what our NET ranking is. Honestly, if we’re going to be good, we have to focus day to day and we have to stay in the moment. We really do. If we get caught up in thinking about what could have or should have, or what somebody else’s opinion is of us and where it is, I think that’s when you lose focus on what you need to do. If you focus day to day, I’ve learned this, you know, playing in the Power Five, and, playing in now in a new league, you can’t look ahead. You look ahead, you will get burned. And if you look at what people say about you, it can take you off your trail.”
Next game
No. 8 Kentucky at Missouri
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
TV: SEC Network+
Radio: WLAP-AM 630
Records: Kentucky 20-4 (9-3 SEC), Missouri 13-14 (2-10 SEC)
Series: Kentucky leads 12-5
Last meeting: Kentucky won 76-71 on Jan. 21, 2024, in Rupp Arena
