With 4 out of 12 players benched due to injury, that could be kind-of scary. Thankfully the Penn-State defense was a little lightweight. But it still could be scary rolling into three very tough games. So this is a good practice game to get our shooters a chance to loosen up.
You know Whalen is short on bench players when, to finish up the game and give some key starters a rest, she is forced to play a 3-post/2-guard offense. Well, good to practice that, actually, you never know when our guards might start fouling out or get injured. I'll say one thing about the 3-post lineup - we sure get a lot of rebounds! 48 for the game, to Penn State's 27, a ratio of 1.815:1. That's 25 second-chance points for the Gophers to Penn State's 10. The second-chance points by themselves account for half of the 30-point margin of victory.
Also, we had 22 fast-break points to their 8, a fast-break-point margin of +14. So summing fast-break-points margin plus second-chance-points margin = 29 out of the 30-point margin of victory. That isn't the whole story, though, since our good three-point shooting also certainly played a positive role in the win.
Perez with a career-record 16 points, including 4-6 from deep. Over the last four games (Indiana/Northwestern/Purdue/Penn State) Perez has shot 10-13 = .769 from deep. On her last trey of the day, I loved the way Pitts cheered, jumping up and down (Lamke-like) on the sidelines. Pitts also scores 4 three-pointers. Byrne scores a trey.
Pitts with another 20+ points, namely 22. She had 13 in the first quarter, I believe.
Bell plays very efficiently, shooting 7-12 (.583) and with ONLY ONE TURNOVER to her 7 assists.
Bello shoots another perfect game, 7-7 for 14 points, plus her 13 rebounds gives her yet another double-double. And all 7 of those made shots were contested shots against a defense that gave her attention. And 3 steals.
Brunson plays a great game. And she has a Bell-like stat line. The only words I can think of are that she put on an awesome demonstration of NYC street ball. Hopefully she would take that as a compliment.
What a nice even distribution of points:
Pitts 22
Bell 17
Brunson 17
Perez 16
Bello 14
Lamke 6
Byrne 3
Kaposi 2
That's five starters with 14 or more points. For what it's worth, I think we play better as a team when we get this kind of broad distribution of point contribution - especially in conjunction with a high Bell assist:turnover ratio of 7 (as opposed to some games that we'd just-as-soon forget in which Bell had a turnover:assist ratio of 2 or 3.
Great game and good prep for the gauntlet games we must run next.
