End of the first quarter: Marquette 26, DePaul 15. The Golden Eagles didn’t look particularly great for the first 10 minutes but when the Blue Demons shoot 38% and turn it over twice, you don’t ask questions
and you take your 11 point margin.
Halftime: Marquette 49, DePaul 27. That’s a 23-12 quarter for the Golden Eagles, with neither team scoring as much as they did in the first quarter, but a 9-0 run in the back half of it turned into a 14-5 run to the end of the frame and helped MU extend their margin from the end of the first.
At the half: Skylar Forbes played eight minutes off the bench after missing Marquette’s last game at Butler for personal reasons, but she shot 4-for-5 and tallied up 10 points while playing less than 50% of the first 20 minutes.
I really want to make this point: Marquette scored 1.44 points per possession in the first half, and held DePaul to 0.79 per trip.
Charia Smith scores in the paint for MU’s first bucket of the second half and then gets two free throws a little while later, and Marquette has their largest lead of the game on both of her scoring instances, 22 points. That’s 53-31 Marquette with 7:17 to go in the third quarter.
Go back and look at the title of the recap.
Halle Vice scores. 55-35 Marquette, 6:11 to play in the quarter, 16:11 left in the game. Same score when the clock winds under six minutes to go in the quarter.
8-0 DePaul run, and then the Blue Demons and Golden Eagles trade buckets for the rest of the half. Look, you don’t want to be up just 12 with 10 minutes to go after you were up 22 in the quarter and up 20 with 5:40 to go in the period, but a lead is a lead, right?
RIGHT?
Friends, the good news is that Marquette shot 63% in the fourth quarter.
THE BAD NEWS IS THAT THEY COMMITTED ELEVEN OF THEIR 24 TURNOVERS IN THE FINAL 10 MINUTES OF THE GAME. To their credit, DePaul realized somewhere along the way that the referees weren’t going to call anything so they just kept getting more and more physical with their full court trap, and Marquette just kept walking straight into it over and over and over again for 16 straight minutes, as MU committed seven of their turnovers in the game back in the third quarter, too.
Marquette got the margin back to 16 with 8:38 left by scoring the first two buckets of the fourth quarter. DePaul scored the next 11 points, and that made it a five point game with 6:30 left. MU clawed it back up to eight as the clock wound under four to go, and boy, is that a damning sentence in retrospect.
I didn’t actually say it up til now, and it’ll be important in a second: One of the reasons why DePaul made this rally? Ally Timm. She had three points on 1-for-2 shooting in the first half. Timm sank two of the three long range attempts she attempted in the third, and then went 4-for-7 from long range in the fourth quarter. That’s 6-for-10 from behind the arc after intermission for Timm, who came into the game shooting 33% on threes for the season and 31% in Big East play.
DePaul scored the next six points, helped along by a 10 second violation (which as assisted itself by a blatant no call as Olivia Porter got hacked badly turning to pass in DePaul’s trap) and two Jaidynn Mason turnovers, neither of which were her fault as her teammates let her down on one and the ball was straight up kicked away from her from behind, but no call from the refs. Two point game, 1:30 left.
Marquette gets it through DePaul’s trap to Halle Vice for a bucket, four point game, 1:20 left. DePaul fumbles the ball on their end, and all Marquette has to do is not screw up as the clock winds under a minute to goooooo and Lee Volker’s lob to Vice as she cuts to the rim is tipped away for a turnover. Timm misses, Kennedi Perkins tears up the floor and eventually draws a foul because the Blue Demons are under 30 seconds to play and down two possessions. Perkins hits the second for a five point lead with 21 seconds left.
The way I see it, Marquette has two jobs. #1: Do not commit a foul under any circumstance. #2: Do not lose Ally Timm under any circumstances. #1 gets accomplished, #2 does not as Vice bites on a pumpfake and Timm rips a three through the net. Two point game, 13 seconds left. Marquette gets a timeout to advance the ball, Mason wastes some time with the inbound but eventually draws the foul and drains her freebies.
Marquette by four, nine seconds left, DePaul has no timeouts left. They have to go the length of the floor and get help. Devin Hagemann gets the inbounds, Bridget Utberg runs with her riiiiight until the last second and she pulls away as Hagemann goes up for a layup with three seconds left AND THAT IS JUST TOO MUCH PHYSICALITY FOR THE REF TO TOLERATE.
16 minutes of DePaul battering Marquette with their trap, almost no calls. Utberg backs off as it’s clear Hagemann is going to shoot it, THAT’S a foul.
Sure, buddy.
She misses both. Tieup, arrow says DePaul, 1.3 to play.
You know what, fine, that’s fine, just walk off to the bench, Marquette, there is zero reason to try to defend this shot, the only way something bad happens to you is if you foul Timm shooting the three that we all know that she is going to shoot…. and you’re defending this inbounds. And Utberg falls down going around the screen as Timm catches and shoots and hits as time expires.
Y’all know what happens if Utberg rolls into Timm’s feet when she lands, right? You all understand that’s about the only way that this goes to overtime, is if you try to defend a shot that can not get to four points of value unless you help it there. Everyone understands that, right? No? Because you almost did it anyway?
Fine, whatever. It’s a fantastic closing note to a near-total-disaster of a final 16 minutes, made worse by MU nearly blowing a 14 point lead at the start of the fourth quarter at Butler back on Sunday, and barely escaping from St. John’s with a win in a game where no one got to 60 points, and falling behind 19-0 to Georgetown out of the gate and never challenging the Hoyas in a meaningful way, and giving up a 17-0 run to Seton Hall immediately after staking themselves to a 20-5 lead out of the gate.
In other words: It was a bad end to the game, and in context, it was even worse.
I’m going to spend some time being surly about not really being able to celebrate Halle Vice’s night. 18 points on 9-for-14 shooting, 14 rebounds, three assists, three blocks, 37 minutes played, and just one of Marquette’s 24 turnovers. A bright spot in an awful lot of cloudy darkness on this night.
Oh, by the way: Skylar Forbes? Her second half? 11 minutes, no points, two rebounds, two turnovers, 0-for-1 from the field. Not listed as questionable, didn’t start after missing the last game for personal reasons, Bob Brainerd said at the start of the broadcast on ESPN+ that he wasn’t sure if she would play at all, and kiiiiiinda looked pseudo-suspended for an awful lot of this game since she played a season low 19 minutes, and if not psuedo-suspended, then kinda checked out at the very least. Maybe I’m reading way too much into all of this, but the vibes on this are wretched at the very least.
Up Next: Oh, great. Next up is a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., and that means facing that Georgetown team that just completely handled Marquette’s business just 11 days ago. Tipoff on truTV is set for 4pm Central time on Sunday, February 1st. The Hoyas are 1-1 since playing Marquette, with the loss coming at home to UConn, but they’ll have to host Seton Hall on Thursday before the Golden Eagles arrive in D.C.
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