important close out win for the new-look Zags
This past Thursday evening, the Gonzaga Women hosted the Rice Owls as the second-leg in a home-home series against the Houston, TX team.
As highlighted in the preview, Rice had shown a high degree of toughness and willingness to foul in their preceding five games and this match was no different with the exception that the referees seemed inclined to allow for a more physical game than typically seen.
This resulted in just 27 total fouls for both teams, which is just 8.5 about the number of fouls Rice had averaged in the early part of this season. As such, this game went back and forth throughout the entirety of the 40 minutes with Rice’s biggest lead being 5, Gonzaga’s being 7, and a fourth quarter that saw Rice lead for the majority before falling off in the final two minutes where the Bulldogs showed immense poise to clip the Owls’ chance of a road victory with their 72-69 point win.
The game started off nicely with Coach Fortier clearly instructing her team to get Claire O’Connor heavily involved immediately off the touch. Maud passed up an open three at the top of the circle by finding Claire for her own three in the corner. Later on, Maud was trying to find the high-low entry pass to Ejim, but with her drawing the double team, the Dutch forward made the good decision to again find Claire for another three.
This paid off immensely for Claire and company as she finished the first quarter with 8 points and ended the match with a career-high, 18 points on 7-13 overall shooting while also chipping in 10 rebounds, 2 assists, 1 steal, and just 1 turnover. O’Connor looked much better than she had in the preceding 4 games and getting her involved early may be an important part of developing her confidence to strut her stuff on the floor.
However, Claire’s tenacity and shooting wasn’t just good for her, but also for the team, as we saw Yvonne Ejim add a team-high 22 points, Allie Turner return to double-digit scoring with 12 points, and Ines take a larger step in her distribution as she tied Maud for a team-high 4 assists.
Yvonne in particular looked ready for Rice’s aggression down low as she battled strong for rebounds, put-backs, and carving out her position. The team still needs to work on the timing with their entry passes, but we saw wonderful consistency from the Canadian as she scored 6, 4, 8, and 8 across the four quarters.
There was an interesting wrinkle that I saw once in the first quarter and was waiting for this to pop up again, but didn’t seem to occur for whatever reason. In this situation, Ejim posts up on the block and Ines starts form the strong side three point line with the ball. The Portuguese guard then drives to the strong side elbow, stops, fakes the kick out pass which draws the crashing post help, and then feeds a slip pass to Yvonne who had secured her post-up for an easy lay-up.
I felt this represented a new way to get our star the delivery she deserves and looked much better than simply entering the post from the perimeter given the amount of attention Ejim has been receiving this season. I’m not sure if it was actually the play draw up, but it looked good and I’ll be interested to see if the coaching staff elects to integrate such action in future games.
On this trend, I thought Ines looked pretty good last night. As noted above, she did end the night with 4 assists, but did commit 4 turnovers. That being said, two of those turnovers were from traveling, which I found amusing given how loose the referees called this match, so I’m going to give her a pass here. Not only was Ines’ elbow entry nice to watch, she had an amazing dish into Ejim in the third quarter where she passed from the corner three spot, through the arms of a Rice player with her back turned, and provided our star with one of her easiest layups in traffic of the season.
On the negative side of things, Maud had a rough night against Rice’s big, Sussy Nuglefac. The announcers were commenting about the Bulldogs looking intimidated against her big 6’3” frame, but I’m not so much in agreement outside of Maud’s performance. She finished the night with 4 points on 1-6 shooting, 2 rebounds, 4 assists, 2 steals, 1 turnover, and 4 fouls and just didn’t really look in flow with herself or the team. That being said, I was ready to write of her performance until she stepped up huge in the fourth quarter with her only basket, a three pointer, coming at the 5 minute mark which tied the game and represented the end of the Owls as they would only go on to score 3 points compared to the Bulldog’s 11.
Overall, I think this victory should go a long way towards improving this team’s confidence in themselves when facing adversity. It’s pretty rare to see Gonzaga face such a lackadaisical refereeing crew that allows this degree of physicality and face a squad threatening victory in the Kennel until the dying minutes of the match. To me, this performance shows a degree of mental fortitude needed and to have such a test at this time of the season will likely prove invaluable as the season marches on.
What did you think of the game?
Be sure to check out the Zags face off against New Mexico later today at 3pm EST on ESPN+.