(Photo credit: Aishling Cavanaugh/WCSN)
TEMPE — With 6:37 left in the second quarter, Arizona State watched SMU graduate guard Zanai Jones hit a wide-open three from just to the right of the top of the key. With the swooshing sound of the ball flying smoothly through the net, Jones had made it a 22-22 tie.
That would not last for long.
On the very next possession junior forward Kennedy Basham found a wide-open teammate on the right wing. Junior guard Jalyn Brown caught the pass and went up for the three-point shot. Like Jones, her shot swooshed right through the net.
The made three gave Arizona State (2-2) a 25-22 lead over SMU (2-2), a lead that the Sun Devils held onto for the rest of the game. Graduate guard Tyi Skinner jumped back into the game shortly after Brown’s three and proceeded to almost immediately knock down a three of her own. Brown and Skinner traded off making baskets for ASU all night long, their 25 and 26-point performances going a long way to help head coach Natasha Adair’s Sun Devils emerge with the 80-73 home win Saturday night.
“There are multiple players (that can score the way Brown and Skinner did), it’s just (Tyi Skinner, Jalyn Brown) and I sitting here, but it could be any other player on our team, and that’s just the work that they put in every day,” Adair said. “It’s a tribute to the staff and the team that we built, that we put together. So it might be (Tyi Skinner, Jalyn Brown) and I sitting here today, but it could be someone different tomorrow.”
While Adair might believe that any player on the team could do what Brown and Skinner did, the fact of the matter is that they combined for 63.8% of the teams’ points Saturday night. They didn’t do it selfishly though. The Sun Devils showed good ball movement throughout the game and Brown and Skinner shot with very good efficiency.
Skinner shot 50% from the field and from three and was a perfect 5-of-5 from the free throw line in 36 minutes. Brown shot 55% from the field, 42.9% from three and went 2-for-3 from the charity stripe in 32 minutes.
However, there was one area in which the Sun Devils, specifically Brown, struggled: turnovers.
Brown turned the ball over 13 times on the night, including five times in the first quarter. Her fifth turnover of the quarter was also her third traveling violation. She got the ball on the right wing and came to a stop before continuing to dribble. The violation was called and in the media timeout that followed, Brown was able to reset and fix her mistakes.
“I’m very, very fast,” Brown said. “And sometimes I can move faster than my feet are moving. So that is a mistake that we definitely talked about. I went into the huddle, I tell (Adair), they corrected whatever mistake I was making and after that, I just made the adjustment, make sure I’m catching the ball before I do anything with the ball.”
While Brown and her Sun Devil teammates continued to turn the ball over, it wasn’t as frequent as at the start of the game. Compared to 10 team turnovers and five individual turnovers by Brown in the first quarter, the next closest quarter was the third quarter where the team committed five, four from Brown.
While the Sun Devils gave up 23 turnovers on the night, SMU wasn’t too far behind with 17 turnovers. Junior guard Nya Robertson led the way with four.
Robertson has been the Mustangs’ most important player this year and entered the contest averaging 22 points across her first three games of the season. While the box score shows that Robertson did end up scoring 25 points on the night you need to dig a little deeper to find the truth of her performance.
Robertson was limited by the Arizona State defense to just five points on 28.6% shooting in the first half. She is the commander of the SMU offense and her slow first half was a major reason why ASU entered the break with a 12-point lead.
“(Graduate guard) Jazion Jackson did a phenomenal job on (Robertson),” Adair said. “(Sophomore guard) Jyah LoVett did a phenomenal job on her. But all our guards had a piece because we switch kind of one through three, but she’s a good player. Good players are going to find their rhythm but she didn’t get off in the sense of, she’s the catalyst, she’s what makes them go. So even the shots that she made, they were contested shots. We would corral her, we put her in a pocket, make her take tough shots. I thought we executed that beautifully.”
ASU also won the rebound battle against SMU 46-35. Jackson led the way with 13 rebounds followed by graduate center Navaeh Parkinson with 12.
“(Parkinson’s) just a force inside,” Adair said. “I don’t know if you saw the impact of her rebounds. Navaeh has great hands and great feet. I mean she brought some to her body. She went outside of her body to go get some of those rebounds but that’s just the beauty of our team.”
The good defense turned into good offense. ASU had 19 fastbreak points and the momentum from defensive stops fed into the momentum of the offense. It takes a complete performance to win in college basketball and that’s the type of night the Sun Devils had. After Thursday’s loss to GCU Adair stressed the importance of playing a full 40 minutes, and that’s what her team did on Saturday.
“I just thought we had a rhythm,” Skinner said. “We wanted to start the game and finish the game strong and I just thought that we were doing a good job on defense and it kind of got our offense going. … I thought we did a good job of sharing the ball, executing, and it was just falling for us today.”
