After her Utah women’s basketball team got dropped 77-65 by BYU Saturday afternoon at the Huntsman Center, U coach Elaine Elliott said the problem was not strategy or a lack of effort or execution?
The Cougars are simply a better team.
“There’s not a team in this league more talented than BYU; everyone knows that, and if you can’t see that then you must not have been watching this game,” Elliott said.
The Utes (9-8 overall, 2-3 MWC) were intent on stopping the Y’s Erin Thorn?a junior guard who is tops on the Cougs and second in the Mountain West Conference in scoring, at 18.0 points per game?and they did, as she managed just 12 on 5-of-12 shooting.
However, so much attention was devoted to bottling Thorn up, the Utes never got around to stopping the Cougs’ next option?UCLA transfer Melanie Pearson.
Whoops.
The senior swing player came off the bench and nailed 7-of-9 shots (including 5-for-7 on treys) and was a perfect 9 for-9 from the charity stripe to score a game-high 28 points.
“Pearson single-handedly beat us. The kid was phenomenal,” Elliott said. “She plays 20 minutes and gets her team 28 points?That’s just a great performance.”
For her part, Pearson said she was merely taking advantage of Utah’s defensive priorities?which apparently did not include her.
“They were concentrating so much on Erin and [Jennifer] Leitner that they left me open and I got great shots,” Pearson said.
But while Pearson was the star of the show, Elliott also acknowledged that the Cougars (12-6, 3-2) simply were a team too talented, too tough and too deep for her young Utes to overcome.
After all, while senior guard Erin Gibbons led Utah with 21 points, and senior center Lauren Beckman had 15 points and 7 rebounds, the team as a whole shot a meager 36.5 percent from the field, and the bench contributed just 10 points.
“We’re thin?it’s the same kids every night getting it done, and that doesn’t hold up over a whole season,” Elliott said. “We don’t have a kid like Pearson who can come off the bench and score 28 for us.”
The way BYU started Saturday’s game, it may not have mattered.
Utah’s only lead of the game came at 6-5, and even that was quickly erased when the Y responded with 7-0 run to take a 12-6 lead.
And when the Utes pulled to within 26-22, the Cougars again went on the offensive, using a series of perimeter screens to get open looks at deep bombs. Five Cougars scored in the ensuing 12-2 run that opened up a 14-point advantage?one Utah could not recover from.
BYU wound up shooting 60 percent in the opening 20 minutes to take a 41-29 lead at the break. Utah got no closer than 7 the rest of the way.
“They shoot 60 percent in the first half?that’s tough to handle,” Elliott said. “And we weren’t going to get away with the mental breakdowns we had and the lack of focus?they’re way too good.”
BYU coach Jeff Judkins said the Cougars made a concerted effort to open the floodgates early.
“We came out and I knew we had to get off to a good start,” Judkins said. “Last year, we started slowly because we were not aggressive enough, so we tried to fix that this year.”
Also, as if playing Utah wasn’t motivation enough, BYU had a little extra incentive to perform well Saturday. The Cougars wanted a win for fallen teammate Heather Cheesman, who suffered a bruised vertebrae in last Thursday’s practice and may be lost for the remainder of the season.
“I know she was watching in the hospital, so I hope this made her happy,” Judkins said.