Gamecocks rally to force overtime but fall late to UConn in 1 vs 2 showdown
Going on the road against No. 2 Connecticut, South Carolina women’s basketball didn’t get out in transition like it wanted. The No. 1 Gamecocks missed layups. They turned the ball over.
And yet somehow, Dawn Staley’s team never went away. They battled, they scrapped, they forced overtime — but in the end they simply couldn’t overcome the Huskies’ star freshman, Paige Bueckers, in a 63-59 loss.
Bueckers scored her team’s final 13 points, including all nine in overtime, and led all scorers with 31 points. South Carolina, meanwhile, rallied late but couldn’t overcome problems that haunted it all game.
After going up 59-56 with less than two minutes remaining in the extra period on a smooth layup from junior guard Destanni Henderson, USC never scored again, while Bueckers drained two jump shots and a 3-pointer that bounced high off the back of the rim to complete her furious burst.
South Carolina finished with a season-high 21 turnovers, including a pivotal one by Henderson as she dribbled wildly in the lane following one of Bueckers’ jumpers in overtime, losing control of the ball and stumbling out of bounds. Staley credited those struggles in part to playing with a Nike basketball, not a Wilson one like the Gamecocks typically play with at home.
“Destanni Henderson does not turn the ball over like she turned the ball over. She does not lose control of the ball like you saw her do tonight. She just did it too much and didn’t make the adjustment of playing with the ball,” Staley said. “And it shot us in the foot, because usually we’re getting something, we’re getting at least a shot up, to get our rebounders an opportunity to rebound the ball for second chance points.”
The Gamecocks also went just 18 for 45 on layups, including three misses in a row in the final seconds of regulation. With the game tied, USC got the final shot, but Henderson missed a jumper, junior forward Victaria Saxton missed the putback, and Aliyah Boston couldn’t score on two more attempts off offensive rebounds.
“We’ve been missing layups all year. So you can attribute it to UConn’s defense, everybody else’s defense that we’ve played against that we couldn’t put the ball in the hole,” Staley said. “It is what it is. We have to move on.”
And perhaps most tellingly, the Gamecocks weren’t credited with a single fast-break point after Staley specifically talked about getting easy baskets in transition heading into the contest.
“I don’t think they did anything that was effective,” sophomore guard Zia Cooke said of UConn’s transition defense. “I honestly think it was more of us in our own heads. We had a lot of turnovers in transition. But I definitely think it was more of an us thing than what they did to us.”
Yet despite all that, Staley’s team still had its chances. The Gamecocks were down 50-43 with less than eight minutes to play and responded with an 11-0 surge. Boston scored five points of her team-high 17 points in that stretch, and USC held a four-point lead with less than two minutes to go before Bueckers hit two jumpers.
“We were running different plays for us to get it inside more, so I would say yeah, that was definitely a focus,” Boston said. “And I think getting inside helped us to get back into it.”
South Carolina was also able to get back into it thanks to its defense — UConn didn’t score for more than six minutes in the fourth quarter and shot a season-low 39.7% from the field for the entire game. That cold shooting was particularly pronounced early, when the Huskies went 5 for 22 in the first quarter, allowing the Gamecocks to take a 14-10 lead despite their own offensive mistakes.
UConn got a little more more going in the second quarter and were poised to take a three-point lead into half, before Cooke drilled a half-court buzzer beater to knot things up at 24.
That wound up being the only 3-pointer South Carolina made all game though. When the Gamecocks knocked off the Huskies for the first time last season, they hit eight. South Carolina also shot just 53.3% from the free throw line.
NEXT USC BASKETBALL GAME
Who: No. 1 South Carolina vs. Missouri
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11
Where: Colonial Life Arena
Watch: SEC Network
This story was originally published February 8, 2021 at 9:10 PM.
