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Women’s basketball: Rutgers rallies past Minnesota, 65-59

john shipley, pioneer press
·4 min read

After matriculating a highly ranked recruiting class and welcoming nine players new to the program, Minnesota was confident it could reverse course on a run of disappointing seasons in 2022-23. But after 17 games, the Gophers are mostly in the same spot they’ve been the past few years, among the Big Ten’s bottom teams.

After leading by as many as nine points in the third quarter, the Gophers collapsed down the stretch in a 65-59 loss to Rutgers on Thursday at Williams Arena.

Kaylene Smikle scored a game-high 20 points, and the Scarlet Knights (8-10, 2-4 Big Ten) turned 20 Minnesota turnovers into 20 points to drop the Gophers (8-9 overall, 1-5) into 13th place in the conference standings. Only Northwestern (6-10, 0-6) is worse.

Mallory Heyer led the Gophers with 18 points and added seven rebounds, and Rose Micheaux finished with 17 points and a team-high 10 rebounds. The rest of the Gophers combined for 13 of the team’s 17 assists but as a group shot 7 for 35 from the field with 12 turnovers.

“The coaches gave us a blueprint, and we just didn’t execute the plan,” Micheaux said.

Specifically, coach Lindsay Whalen wanted her team to keep Rutgers out of the blocks, and for a half they did — holding the Scarlet Knights to 14 points in the paint in the first half. But that changed in the third quarter when Rutgers closed with a 15-5 run to take its first lead of the game at 43-41.

The Knights scored 20 points from the paint in the third quarter alone.

“I think they were just taking it more at us and getting buckets in the paint, and that was one of the things on the scout, ‘Don’t let them get their feet in the paint, don’t let them get buckets in the paint,’ ” Heyer said. “And clearly we didn’t execute that, so clearly we have to work on that moving forward.”

The Gophers started the second half with a quick 3-pointer from Braun to increase their lead to 29-21, then pushed the lead to 36-27 on a second Braun 3-pointer at 7:44. That prompted a 30-second timeout from Rutgers coach Coquese Washington, and whatever the first-year coach told her team worked.

The Gophers committed five turnovers in the third quarter, leading to 12 Rutgers points.

The turnovers have been a common problem this season.

“We had some tough times of throwing (the ball) away and trying to thread the needle when it’s just not there,” Whalen said. “There were some unfortunate moments there.”

Rutgers took a pair of two-point leads early in the fourth quarter, but otherwise the teams traded baskets and the game was tied, 49-49, after a pair of Heyer free throws with 4:28 remaining. It stayed that way, despite two more Minnesota turnovers, until Heyer hit a second-chance 3-pointer for a 52-49 lead with 3:34 left.

That prompted another timeout from Washington, and the Knights tied it on a 3-pointer by Antonia Bates, her first basket in 23 minutes and Rutgers’ only 3-point basket of the game. Minnesota retook the lead on a pair of free throws by Micheaux. Rutgers got a pair of free throws from Smikle and, after a Gophers’ shot clock violation, a layup by Awa Sidibe to go up 56-54.

Braun hit two free throws to tie the game at 56-56, and Kai Carter put the Scarlet Knights back up by two with a pair of her own, and the Gophers never got closer. A layup by Smikle gave Rutgers a 60-57 lead with 50 seconds left, and Rutgers outshot Minnesota 5-2 from the stripe in the final 29 seconds to seal its second conference victory of the season.

“We just need to hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes, and we need to learn from them and we need to get better until we don’t make those mistakes,” Heyer said. “Because we’re making the same mistakes. It’s about learning from those and moving forward.”

Minnesota will take a four-game losing streak into Sunday afternoon’s game against Illinois at Williams Arena.

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