Quick Thinking
January 30, 2008 01:44 AM | General
January 30, 2008
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Mike Carey showed Tuesday night against Rutgers that he is as good as anyone in the business when it comes to thinking on his feet. It was Carey’s quick thinking in the second half that put West Virginia into position to record one of its biggest victories in school history.
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| LaQuita Owens drives to the basket to score two of her game-high 23 points in West Virginia's 63-54 upset victory over Rutgers Tuesday night in Morgantown.
AP photo |
Trailing by nine points against the nation’s fourth-ranked team, Carey got an unexpected visitor to the West Virginia bench when his best player Olayinka Sanni picked up her fourth foul with 17 minutes left in the game. Sitting a few seats down the bench from Sanni was Meg Bulger, whose day-to-day knee injury is now going on a week. Those two players alone make up more than 30 points per game of West Virginia’s offense.
With really no other reasonable options available, Carey chose to go small by putting 5-foot-11-inch guard Liz Repella on the floor in place of Sanni and using a lineup that didn’t have a single player standing 6 feet tall.
Meanwhile, Rutgers had three players 6 feet or taller in the game including 6-foot-4-inch junior center Kia Vaughn. The only way Carey could get away with playing that small was to change defenses after just about every timeout, free throw or change of possession.
Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer admitted afterward that her team was bothered by West Virginia’s 1-3-1 zone and constantly changing defenses. That in itself is a remarkable statement considering all five Rutgers starters were back from last year’s NCAA title game and not a single starter had fewer than 55 games of playing experience under their belts. Two, Essence Carson and Matee Ajavon, had played a combined 235 games heading into today’s contest.
“They switched zones and then zone to man,” Stringer said. “When that happened we lost eight seconds on that. They weren’t even pressing us and it took us 15 seconds to bring it up and think about the fact that they were switching.
“Guess what?” Stringer said. “When you’re doing that you don’t have a lot of time. I thought it was a smart adjustment on the part of their coach.”
Carey explained that he wasn’t about to let Rutgers have time to figure out what his team was doing and get comfortable.
“It seemed like they felt like they could force the ball inside and quit trying to attack on the perimeter and we did a good job of defending and got some turnovers,” Carey said. “I really think the 1-3-1 at times really bothered them. We were not going to stay in that. After timeouts or foul shots we were just trying to give them different looks and get them out of rhythm a little bit.”
Rutgers shot 52.6 percent in the first half and led 28-22 at halftime. In the second half the Scarlet Knights made 9 of 27 field goal attempts (33.3 percent) and had nine turnovers.
“The truth of the matter is when Sanni went out we should have gone inside more,” Stringer said. “But we turned the ball over more often than not because it was the extra pass that we needed to catch. Kia needed to do a better job of sealing it and going to the ball.”
Carey understood, too, that if his guards could hold onto the basketball and his team could get off more shots than Rutgers it had a chance to pull off the upset.
“Their defense sets up a lot of their offense,” Carey said. “When you take care of the basketball then you have an opportunity. You have to put up more shots than Rutgers does and hopefully some of those will go in.”
Carey made one other adjustment offensively, moving senior Chakhia Cole out to the top of the key forcing Vaughn out of the paint to guard her.
“I thought once we opened up the post and brought Vaughn away from the basket a little bit that really allowed us to penetrate a little more,” Carey said. “We got a couple of backdoors. Liz Repella was able to drive. We forced some people to help and then we were able to kick for some easy shots.”
During one stretch LaQuita Owens scored eight straight points to get West Virginia back into the game. The senior finished with a game-high 23 points, including a huge step-back three with just two seconds left on the shot clock that gave the Mountaineers an eight-point lead with 2:08 remaining.
“Who in the world would have thought that the guard Owens would light us up the way that she did,” Stringer admitted. “We made a switch; the first part Epiphanny (Prince) was playing her. The second part we decided to switch and she ate us up.”
When the game came down to the final media timeout, Carey challenged his team to go out and win that four-minute period.
“We showed a lot of heart, we showed a lot of discipline and showed a lot of things that we needed to do to win the basketball game,” Carey said.
Stringer paid West Virginia and Carey a nice compliment by calling them a “blue-collar version” of her Rutgers team.
“We both stress defense,” Carey said. “We stress fundamentals. We have to do the little things in order to beat a team like that. They’re the same way. They don’t have great shooters but they’re great athletes. They usually play harder than the other teams and they play better defense than the other teams.”
That is usually the case, except for tonight.
“It speaks well of West Virginia,” Stringer said. “They did a great job and they deserved to win.”
