12/21/2016 basketball Edit

Purdue loses battle in paint, loses game to IUPUI

Kyle Charters • BoilerUpload

Staff Writer

@KyleCharters79

Purdue had a nine-point lead at the half against IUPUI in Mackey Arena Wednesday afternoon.

Then, it gave up a 9-0 run to start the second.

Then, it couldn’t stop the Jaguars, particularly Mikale Rogers, in the paint.

Then, it couldn’t make its own shots in the lane.

Then, in the end, Purdue lost, dropping its first-ever game to instate IUPUI and ending its six-game winning streak and heading to the holiday break — and the Big Ten schedule after — on a sour note. The Boilermakers (9-5) hadn’t lost in four previous games from 2008-13 vs. IUPUI, winning by an average of nearly 28 points.

But Wednesday afternoon, the Jaguars (9-3), led by former Boilermaker Austin Parkinson, looked the enforcers.

“(The win) puts us on the map now,” said Rogers, who had 24 points and 11 rebounds in handing Purdue a 67-62 loss. “People are going to want to play us, because we come to play every single game. It means something to me and I know it means something to my teammates. It’s really big to win here.”

The Boilermakers, however, looked as though they might be able to hold the Jaguars off. When Ashley Morrissette scored on a pretty end-of-half full-court set play — she took a pass from Ae’Rianna Harris, who had received a three-quarters court inbound — Purdue held a 35-26 edge.

Perhaps the Boilermakers relaxed. IUPUI reeled off nine straight in he first 2:31 of the second half, forcing a Sharon Versyp timeout with the game tied at 35. All nine points came via the layup.

“We can’t let a team go on a 9-0 run coming out of halftime, especially when halftime is for making adjustments,” said Morrissette, who scored 10 points but on 4-of-13 shooting with five turnovers. “We just didn’t listen, or we weren’t motivated. But there’s no excuse for a team to come out and go on a 9-0 run on us.”

The Jaguars scored 24 points in the third quarter, 14 of them in the paint, by hitting 9-of-12 shots including their only two three-pointers, one of them banked in by Rogers.

“That’s what you call a Christmas miracle,” Parkinson said.

IUPUI held a one-point lead, 50-49, headed into the fourth, after Kelsi Byrd, the younger sister of former Purdue player D.J. Byrd, drove the lane and scored with less than 10 seconds to go in the third. After Purdue responded briefly at the start of the fourth, Rogers took over; the 6-foot-2 center scored 10 of her team’s 15 during a 15-7 run that turned a three-point deficit into a 65-60 lead with 1:24 left.

All IUPUI’s points in the stretch, aside from Rogers’ baseline jumper at 2:10, were layups or free throws. The Jaguars scored 36 points in the paint.

“We didn’t take enough pride in our defense,” said forward Bridget Perry, who scored a dozen and had eight rebounds. “We play post players like (Rogers) in the Big Ten, and we’ve played them so far, against Stanford and Wichita State.

“It’s knowing the scouting report. We knew she liked to middle and we didn’t adjust. She did the same move every time, with success, and we didn’t adjust. That’s about us taking pride in defense and saying, ‘You know what, I’m not going to let this person score any more.’ It was huge. She had a great game.”

But the Boilermakers were undone by their own missed bunnies, too. Andreona Keys had a layup roll out at 1:45 and Dominique Oden spun one out a possession later.

“When your shot’s going in-and-out,” Morrissette said, “it doesn’t give an excuse to come back on defense and not care about or have pride on defense just because you didn’t score. That was something that happened a couple times — a lot of times — and I think we can definitely do better than that.”

The Boilermakers, who played only a rotation of seven, had 70 field goal attempts — 19 more than IUPUI — but made only 27, for just 38.6 percent. Oden had 17 points on 7-of-12 shooting, including makes on all three of her three-pointers. Keys had 11 and Harris scored 10 and grabbed seven rebounds.

But Dominique McBryde was off, hitting only 1-of-7 shots and struggling to defend the paint; she played only 17 minutes, second-lowest this season (she fouled out of the Stanford game in only 10 minutes).

“Got to be tougher, got to take pride,” Versyp said, asked about what to fix on the interior defense. “There’s some players who take a lot of pride and others who don’t, so they’ve got to figure it out. We have a short bench and I’ll play six, so they’ve got to figure it out or we’re going to play six.”

IUPUI shot 47.1 percent and had a huge advantage at the line, hitting 16-of-22, whereas Purdue made only three of its eight. Danielle Lawrence had 14 points and eight rebounds, while Jenna Gunn scored 11. Byrd had four points in 14 minutes off the bench.

The Boilermakers now have more than a week before their next game, the Big Ten opener at Northwestern Dec. 31.

“Everybody needs to get away and get a clean frame of mind,” Versyp said. “When you come back, everybody is 0-0. No matter what you’ve done in nonconference, it really doesn’t matter. But we’ve got to be teach our young ones … that the Big Ten is totally different and we’ve got to work on mindset, mindset, mindset and have a little bit more pride. There’s a majority of our kids that have it, but there’s a couple who need to figure it out.”

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