In loss to No. 1-ranked South Carolina, Kentucky women find some pluses
If you apply the basketball statistic known as plus/minus, you’d give this Kentucky women’s basketball team a +18.
Way back on Jan. 2, Matthew Mitchell’s team was crushed in Columbia, run out of the gym 99-72 to the host South Carolina Gamecocks in the SEC opener for both teams.
“That was a real wake-up call for us,” Mitchell called it Sunday.
Sunday was the rematch in Memorial Coliseum, and while the host Cats couldn’t conquer the No. 1-ranked Gamecocks they at least played well enough and hung around long enough to make the visitors work for it before losing 67-58.
“I thought for the most part Kentucky pretty controlled the tempo of the game,” said South Carolina Coach Dawn Staley, her team now 27-1 overall and 14-0 in the conference.
Not just that, but thanks to Mississippi State’s surprise loss to Alabama on Sunday, the Gamecocks clinched the regular-season SEC title. They’ve won 21 straight games. They are 11-0 on the road. In short: South Carolina is really, really good.
So good that only two league teams have come within single digits of the Gamecocks, whose closest call was an 81-79 win over Mississippi State on Jan. 20. Since that squeaker, however, not one of the Gamecocks’ next eight opponents had come within 15 points of Staley’s standout squad.
Until Sunday. Kentucky actually owned a 14-12 lead with 4:44 left in the first quarter — “We knew Kentucky would come out and play with a lot of energy at the beginning of the game,” Staley said — before South Carolina ripped off a 15-0 run to take a 27-14 lead at the end of the first 10 minutes. From then on, however, UK went toe-to-toe with the nation’s top-ranked team, outscoring the visitors 44-40.
It was 40-30 South Carolina at halftime. And after the Gamecocks pushed the advantage out to 17 points (58-41) in the third quarter, UK tightened things up and held the visitors to just eight points in the final quarter.
“They’re No. 1 in the country, but I think we did a lot of good things today,” UK star Rhyne Howard said. “Even with the things we didn’t do too well we can refocus and work on those.”
Howard scored a game-high 24 points, but she had to work for all 24. She was just five of 22 from the floor. Continuing to play with a splint on her left hand, it’s obvious that at times Howard has trouble holding onto the ball. What she has been able to accomplish playing with her broken pinkie has been remarkable.
“I don’t have as good a grip with my left hand,” she said Sunday. “But I just have to push through it and be able to play and stay tough for my teammates.”
Howard is to be X-rayed again this week. She is hoping for a smaller splint, but said she will probably will not be splint-free for the rest of the season. Still, a smaller splint would be welcome news for a team that has just two regular-season games remaining — Georgia at home Thursday; Vandy on the road next Sunday.
So 9-5 in the SEC, 20-6 overall, where does Mitchell’s team stand? Are the Wildcats really 18 points better than January?
“We just didn’t show up very well that night,” said Mitchell of that first game in Columbia. “It was a real blessing at the time, a real gift that we were given because we had to quickly lock in on our identity at that point in time. We had to get much tougher and get much more focused and zeroed-in on having a fierce competitive spirit.”
Can they make more improvement at the season’s most critical time?
“What we have to continue to focus on is how can we be a successful team,” Mitchell said. “And a big ingredient of that is being tough and physically fought and mentally tough.”
There’s no better time to be on the plus side.
