Unfortunately, at the conclusion of Saturday’s Thanksgiving Midtown Tournament, the UNM women’s basketball team (4-2) wasn’t able to say “Winner, winner — turkey dinner!”
University of Toledo’s (5-2) menacing zone was the brainteaser the Lobos could never decipher, especially at the tail end of the game, resulting in a 62-56 loss for UNM.
Trailing 57-53, UNM needed a crucial basket to cut the margin to a single-possession deficit. Instead, the Lobos searched hopelessly for a way to navigate the Rockets’ zone, nonchalantly passing the ball around while the shot clock sounded with 1:10 left to go in the game.
Amy Beggin, who scored a game-high 18 points and was named to the all-tourney team, drained a 3-pointer basket with 43 seconds left to pull UNM within two points, but by that time the damage was done.
Naama Shafir netted three free throws to secure the tournament title for Toledo.
Head coach Don Flanagan was peeved at his Lobos’ lack of urgency.
“We ran 30 seconds off (the clock) at a time we should’ve have been managing clock,” he said. “We should’ve been much more aggressive at that point.”
Flanagan, however, got introspective during his post-game conference and second-guessed his decision to foul the Rockets in the waning seconds of the game.
After Beggin pulled the Lobos within a 3-pointer of knotting the game, Flanagan opted to foul the Rockets instead of gambling on Toledo missing a shot. It didn’t work — and Shafir, who finished with 13 points, dashed the Lobos’ hopes.
“A better decision, as I look back at it, might have been to defend, see if they miss, and then get the rebound and then we got one shot to win,” Flanagan said. “I think that would’ve been a better decision, but we went to the foul after trying to trap. If I had to do it in retrospect, I think I would’ve seen if our defense could’ve held them. I think it was a poor decision on my part that we didn’t play defense for 30 seconds and see what happened and then hopefully block out.”
The problem was that UNM failed to keep Toledo off the boards all night, Flanagan said.
“Now, we didn’t do a good job blocking out all game, and I wasn’t really sure I trusted our ability to block them off the glass on a missed shot,” he said. “If they got a second opportunity, then the game’s over.”
After possessing an eight-point lead at one point in the game, the frazzled Lobos frayed, leaving Flanagan repeatedly scowling on the sidelines.
There were two reasons the Lobos had trouble with Toledo’s zone.
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Shooting 37 percent from the field, Flanagan said, didn’t help.
“One, we didn’t hit shots,” Flanagan said. “I thought we had pretty much open shots from time to time. We didn’t knock them down. That was one reason. Second reason was we didn’t get second shots. We didn’t go aggressive enough against their zone. I think it was a good zone. It was hard to break. Anytime you drove, they really did a nice job of pinching drives. And then they hit the boards really hard.”
Not only were the Lobos out-rebounded 43-35 and netted just eight second-chance points, the crux of UNM’s problems rested on its inability to hit open, uncontested 3-pointers. Settling for 33 3-point shots, UNM hit just nine — Beggin and Sara Halasz combining to shoot 17 of those 3s.
“You just got to focus and look for the holes — that’s what we weren’t doing tonight,” said Halasz, who finished with 11 points. “We weren’t looking for the holes, looking for the cutters when we went motion. That’s what I settled for, because I felt when I came in the game, my shot was falling.”
