Cavalier Classic: Cavs, Techsters Advance
Sunday, December 28 2008 by Tim
There’s only two things that I know about the Louisiana Tech women’s basketball team. The first is that they have the worst team nickname outside of the Hokies. The second is that the “Lady Techsters” (yes, that’s really their team name) came out to play against UMBC.
I’m not sure if I was accurate during my preview in saying that the only heavyweight in the tournament besides the Hoos was UMBC. Louisiana Tech certainly has some history as a program and they’ve been ranked in the top 10 each of the previous four times that the Cavaliers played them. But this season their resume was decidedly mediocre.
No matter, they said. They took out the Retrievers of UMBC by a score of 83-62 in the first game of the Marriott Cavalier Classic. The Lady Techsters had two players score at least 20 points (Whitney Jones (21) and Adrienne Johnson (20)) and two others in double figures (Shanavia Dowdell (16) and Jasmine Bendolph (10)). Erin Brown (15) and Carlee Cassidy (14) led the Retrievers in scoring.
This game looked evenly matched as it was occurring and I’ll admit to doing a double-take when I saw the difference in the score. The difference in that game turned out to be shooting percentage as Louisiana Tech made 10 more shots (34 versus 24) on two less attempts (72 versus 74). They also had a decided advantage on the glass with 58 total rebounds compared to 37 for UMBC.
As much as I’ll admit to being wrong about UMBC being the heavyweight competition in this tournament, I also have to say that I was more right than I knew in that the Cavaliers should have it easy with Rider. The Cavaliers slaughtered Rider, taking a 48-19 lead into halftime and finishing the game off 83-38. It could have been a lot worse if we had kept our starters in.
About four minutes into the game, the Broncos had just made a layup to put the score at 6-4 in favor of the Cavaliers. I was a bit worried that we were seeing some of the laziness that we witnessed during the game against Mount St. Mary’s.
Another eight minutes beyond that, the Hoos had extended the lead to 27-17 and looked like they were settling in a little bit. Still, I was cautious in my optimism.
I didn’t need to be.
Over the last eight minutes of the first half, Monica Wright and Lyndra Littles simply took the game over as they’ve been known to do. With a little help from Shine, W. Edwards and Moorer, the Cavaliers would finish the half with a 21-2 run.
The second half was… well… boring. But also exactly what I said I wanted to see in the preview. Wright and Littles sat out the final 12 minutes of the game. Young players got more PT. We still destroyed the Broncos.
Despite only playing 23 minutes (that might be a season-low, I’m not positive), Wright still led all scorers with 22 points. Right behind her was Littles with 21 in only 16 minutes. If that’s not an indication of how dominating these two players were in this game, I don’t know what is.
A couple of other indicators of how this game went were the steal and turnover numbers. Virginia had 18 steals (6 of them by Monica Wright) and forced 34 turnovers. The Cavaliers had only 13 turnovers.
The offense was effective, the defense was stifling, thus the game was a blowout. Not much more to say than that!
The Cavaliers will face Louisiana Tech tomorrow at 7pm in the Championship game of the Marriott Cavalier Classic.
As usual, I’ve got some photos up in the photo gallery for you to check out.