Wildcats take down tired team

It is said that revenge is the best medicine.
Unfortunately, for the UNM women’s basketball team, red-hot Arizona turned last year’s 81-61 Lobo triumph in Tucson, Ariz., into an 84-60 home loss Tuesday at The Pit.

UNM was outshot 51 percent to 28.6 percent.
Head coach Don Flanagan didn’t hide his disappointment in the postgame interview.

“One of the poorest games I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. “We didn’t get back on defense. We didn’t block out. … We need to get back to square one.”

The Wildcats improved to 6-2, while the Lobos dropped to 5-4 on the year.
The game was one-sided from the opening minutes, as the Lobos got stumbled out of the gates, shooting just 2-of-15 in the first 10 minutes. Meanwhile, Arizona racked up a 25-4 lead with 11:16 remaining in the first half and never looked back.

“That start paved the way for the rest of the game,” senior guard Amanda Best said. “We couldn’t get out of that hole that we dug in the first half. We had a little bit of a surge to close out the first half, but we couldn’t get over that hump. It was too big of a separation at that point.”

The Lobos came out sluggish, looking tired having come off of 10 straight days of basketball. UNM played three games last week.

“Our offense was slow,” Flanagan said. “Sometimes when you play a lot of games in a row, you can make an excuse that they have tired legs, but I don’t want to make any excuses. We need to get into better shape, and we need to run the floor better.”

UNM entered the locker room down 38-24 at halftime.
The Wildcats were particularly hot from beyond the arc in the second half, hitting 12 treys during the game, as the Lobos switched to a zone defense midway through the second half. Arizona had four players in double figures, including Davellyn Whyte who posted a game-high 24 points.

“I thought we were a pretty good defensive team until today,” Flanagan said. “You’re always concerned when you have a lot of freshmen playing that they’ll play like freshmen, and that’s what they did. A lot of the older players didn’t help, either. They didn’t step up.”

There were few bright spots for UNM, but Best did post a season-high 20 points, while freshman Jasmine Patterson had a career-high seven steals and tied her career-high of 11 points.

“Jazz had a good game,” Flanagan said. “She’s a freshman, but she did a good job of putting pressure on them. I feel that she was one of the only players out there that was giving them trouble on the defensive side.”

The Lobos will have to rebound quickly, as they head to Oklahoma on Sunday for an afternoon matchup.
“We have to go back to the gym and go to work,” Flanagan said. “We have a more successful and higher-ranked opponent on Sunday, so we have a lot of improvement to do in a short period of time.”