It’s been a lot of firsts for the Arizona Wildcats this week. They played their first road game of the year and their first ranked opponent. On Wednesday, it ended in a 75-56 loss at Colorado. On Saturday, it was an 80-49 loss at No. 21 Texas Tech.
Once again, turnovers were a problem for Arizona, but they took care of the ball better than most of the Lady Raiders’ other opponents. The Wildcats had 17 turnovers in the game, including several offensive fouls. Twelve of those came in the first half.
Texas Tech came into the game forcing 20.8 turnovers per game. Not only did the Wildcats finish with almost four fewer turnovers than the Raiders generally force, but they forced 14 on the other end. That 3.0 margin was well below the 5.2 turnover margin TTU has enjoyed this season.
The Wildcats also scored at least 10 points in each quarter. They left behind the four-point second quarter against Utah and the five-point first quarter against Colorado.
Those were the silver linings, though. Arizona allowed TTU to shoot 42 percent from 3-point distance and 47 percent overall.
The Raiders held UA to 35 percent shooting overall and 25 percent from 3. They also held Wildcats’ leading scorer Micky Perdue to nine points on 3-of-11 shooting.
After the Colorado game, Arizona head coach Becky Burke talked about wanting players to find ways to contribute even when they weren’t scoring. Perdue did that against TTU by leading the Wildcats with four steals. She also contributed two rebounds and an assist.
“One thing about Micky is she’ll try to if…she’s having an off night, she’s going to make up for it somewhere else,” said junior guard Tanyuel Welch.“So her getting those steals, they really contributed. You can tell she was trying to bring the energy somewhere else.”
Welch was the only Wildcat to break into double digits. She finished with 19 points on 9-of-12 shooting. She finished just shy of a double-double with a team-high nine rebounds. She added one assist and one steal.
Welch said she went in with one thing on her mind.
“Just being aggressive and attacking, not being scared,” she said. “I was excited for this game, as I am going into any game. You can just go in like you’re going to win, and like you got a chip on your shoulder. I knew that we was going to be the undersized team, you know, my teammates and all that. Yeah, Texas Tech, they’re bigger, they have a lot of talent, but at the end of the day, it comes down to who wants to be the dog, you know? Who has that emotion, that energy, who’s going to keep attacking even when things are going wrong? So that’s my idea. Keep attacking.”
While Welch was successful with her approach, it didn’t work for everyone on the team.
“We really have one player on our team right now on the perimeter that has the size and athleticism to play at a high level in this league, and she’s sitting right next to me right now,” Burke said. “We have other really good players. They’re small…They’re not extremely quick. So we got to trust that we need to go multiple sides on the floor, we need to get to multiple actions. And I think a lot of times we try to win one on one, and we know who and what we are. We’re not going to win that battle a lot against teams in the Big 12.”
Arizona once again had difficulty getting scoring inside. Only 13 of the 49 points came from the four bigs that played. The Wildcats’ bigs also continued to have foul trouble.
Nora Francois and Daniah Trammell ended with four fouls each in over 20 minutes of play. Achol Magot fouled out in 10 minutes.
Magot spent her first two seasons at Texas Tech. She was effective when she was on the floor, scoring five points and grabbing an offensive board in her 10 minutes against her former team. However, her tendency to be demonstrative after scoring cost her this time when she was whistled for a technical in the fourth quarter. It was her fourth foul.
“That can’t happen in a close game,” Burke said. “I don’t think it had any impact whatsoever in today’s game, which is why I didn’t get too uptight about it. But yeah, I mean, we’re gonna be in close games where she’s gonna score the basketball and can’t show that much emotion towards the other team. Obviously, this one was a little bit of a different situation for her, given the fact that it’s her previous team, so I know she was just out there trying to be competitive, and it was all in good fun for her. And want to spice things up a little bit, get her teammates going, which I’m all about…We need to show some fire and competitiveness, regardless of what the score is, so I was okay with it in that moment, but we’ve definitely talked to her about it and we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen in a closer game.”
Texas Tech completed the best start in program history by improving to 16-0 overall. The Lady Raiders are 3-0 in Big 12 play. After ASU’s loss at BYU earlier in the day, TTU joins Iowa State and TCU as the three Big 12 teams who have yet to lose a game this season.
