Slow first quarter dooms Purdue women in opener
By the time the Boilermakers got settled in their opener Friday night, they were down 25-6 at the end of the first quarter.
And they had committed 10 turnovers.
By then, it was too late. Purdue (0-1) lost to the home Black Bears, 67-47, in its first game in the Maine Tip-Off Tournament. The Boilermakers will play Saturday vs. the loser of Villanova and Mississippi State.
They’ll need a lot of improvement in less than 24 hours.
“We were just bad,” Coach Sharon Versyp said in a post-game radio interview. “They were good, we were just bad. You can’t turn the ball over 10 times in the first quarter and give 10 points on layups that aren’t contested. They were ready to play.
“… Can’t put the ball in the hoop, can’t score, keep giving up the ball.”
Not a good formula. The Boilermakers, who trailed 17-1 in the first six minutes, shot only 30.6 percent from the floor, with 17 turnovers. Ten came in the first quarter, including four in the first two minutes; the Boilermakers didn’t score their first field goal until a Dominique Oden layup with 3:27 left in the first, and then Purdue was down 17-3.
The Boilermakers trailed 36-18 at the half, then by as many as 25 in the third quarter, before rallying to 55-43 at the eight-minute mark of the fourth. But Purdue went the next 6:21 without a point as the Black Bears (1-0) pulled away.
“The second half we gave better effort,” said Versyp, who coached Maine from 2000-2005. “We’ve got a long way to go. We’re not even close to being an average team. You’ve got to have players step in. (Andreona) Keys played a good game, but the rest of the leadership wasn’t there. You play on the road, you have a young team. We’ve just got to learn from it.”
Oden, a freshman guard, led Purdue with 11 points, hitting 4-of-11 from the field but missing all five of her three-pointers. Ashley Morrissette was the only other Boilermaker in double-figures, with 10, but on only 4-of-12.
Keys scored two with four assists and three rebounds, while Dominique McBryde had seven points and seven rebounds.
“I thought Dominique Oden and Keys were the best players on the floor, with defense, offense, executing, fighting and setting things up and knowing what we need to do,” Versyp said. “I thought those two came to play tonight, the only two.
Maine shot 48.1 percent from the field, with 16 turnovers. It was led by 17 points each from Blanca Millan and Sigi Koizar.
“The guard play was great and when you get the energy and are knocking down shots, great things come,” Versyp said. “For us, we didn’t knock down shots, so bad things come.”
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