In Missouri’s first true test of the season, the Tigers showed up to play. Though Lauren Hansen’s game-tying shot as time expired didn’t fall, if we learned anything in the Tigers’ 70-68 loss at No. 5 Baylor, it’s that this team can run with anyone. Here are a few takeaways from Saturday’s thrilling game that saw Missouri come up just short.
Missouri has got to do a better job staying out of foul trouble
If the Tigers avoid picking up numerous fouls, they probably win this game by a couple possessions.
Freshman point guard Mama Dembele had three fouls and had to sit out for much of the second half. Her role as an offensive facilitator and a relentless defender was missed in that half, and though Missouri ran with Baylor — even outscoring the Bears 41-36 in the final 20 minutes — it’s likely that the Tigers would have scored more and allowed fewer points had Dembele not been called for fouls early on.
But it was Aijha Blackwell’s foul trouble that hurt the Tigers most. She picked up her fourth foul with 6:12 remaining in the contest with the game tied at 60. She subbed out, but came back in out of necessity a minute later. She picked up her fifth foul — a rather questionable offensive foul call — with 3:56 left and the Tigers down by six. Remarkably, that wasn’t the nail in the coffin, but the absence of Blackwell’s innate ability to score and rebound simply made the task too difficult to achieve.
Blackwell scored a team-high 20 points and added 16 rebounds.
“I know Aijha really emptied her tank for us tonight,” head coach Robin Pingeton said postgame. “She loves games like this. This is what it’s all about.”
Dembele, Blackwell, Hayley Frank and Izzy Higginbottom all played several minutes with four fouls, and overall, the Tigers committed 27 fouls to Baylor’s 15. If Missouri manages to keep that gap closer, it likely wins this game.
That was one of our keys going into this game, we wanted to make them finish at the rim,” Pingeton said. “We didn’t want to bail them out, we wanted to make them finish tough shots. And you just cannot send a team to the free throw line 32 times. I mean, you’re going to make it a long, long night on yourself.”
Haley Troup and Lauren Hansen stepped up big when it mattered most
With eight minutes left in the game, Haley Troup scored on a jumper to tie the game at 57. Less than a minute later, she nailed a 3 to give the Tigers their first lead of the night.
The Tigers relied on Troup heavily to keep them in the ballgame late, and the senior did just that. She scored eight points in the fourth quarter and played all 10 minutes. In a spot where other reliable scorers are dealing with fouls, you need to lean on experience to push through, and Troup offered just that.
“You know, Troup did such a great job playing with pace coming off ball screens,” Pingeton said. She’s just got a high basketball IQ and [I] really felt like she left it all out there as well.”
Hansen also had a big fourth quarter, especially after Blackwell fouled out and Frank, Higginbottom and Dembele all were in foul trouble. She had six points in the fourth — two 3-pointers — which each slowed Baylor runs, the second of which brought the Bears’ lead down to just one. She had a chance to tie the game at the buzzer, but her shot rimmed out.
“Lauren, you know that first half was a tough first half for her,” Pingeton said. “But she came back again in the second half and I thought played much more like the Lauren that we’d been getting used to here these last couple games.”
The fact that Hansen and Troup can provide such a spark when others can’t simply showcases how deep this team can play, and how on any given night, it could be anyone’s night to step up.
The Tigers should be really, really proud of that second half
Missouri actually outscored the No. 5 team in the country in the game’s final 20 minutes and held Baylor to 36% shooting and just 1-9 from beyond the arc.
“You know I think that says a lot about their resiliency,” Pingeton said about winning the second half. “I think it says a lot about their toughness. And I’m not surprised. I felt like we had more fight in us. And I told them in the locker room, I’m really proud of them.”
Missouri seemed to have an answer to every shot the Bears made, though a 12-0 Baylor run late in the fourth quarter was the difference. When Missouri missed a shot, it got back on defense and often stopped the Bears from scoring themselves.
The Tigers took better care of the ball and committed just six second-half turnovers compared to nine in the first half. They shot the ball well — 14-30 from the field including five 3-pointers.
Even though even that effort wasn’t enough, the way the team played in the game’s final minutes could set a higher standard for how it wants to play going forward. Consider that half the benchmark. There’s no doubt that there is room for improvement.
Despite the loss, this game will benefit the Tigers in the long run
Though Missouri obviously wishes it could have another shot at the game-winner, the experience of playing a team the caliber of No. 5 Baylor on the road is a crucial experience, win or lose. There’s a lot of youth on this team. Higginbottom just played in the biggest game of her life with the biggest audience she’s ever played in front of. Dembele, though a sophomore, probably just did too. This team just left it all on the floor and overcame serious adversity when its star fouled out with five minutes left. In future tight games, the Tigers will be able to look back on this game and may be able to handle future pressure they otherwise not have been able to handle.
Pingeton has spoken volumes about the joy it is to coach this team. She knows the potential her squad has when it plays selflessly and for the “mission first.” Though this game will officially go down in the loss column, there’s no doubt that Missouri feels victorious, at least morally, for how it fought and battled even when the mountain seemed too steep to climb.
“It’s more about our standards and the toughness, that grittiness we want to play with,” Pingeton said about the big takeaways from the loss. “A couple days before coming to Baylor I just felt like we had kind of lost our edge. We really needed to get back to our roots and the standard that we said we wanted to play with this year. That’s 50/50 plays. That’s grittiness. That’s toughness. And you know, I thought we really did a good job with that today. We’re gonna either win or we’re gonna learn and get better. And this is a group that’s going to continue to lean in and grow from it.”
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