ASU Women’s Basketball: Despite experience, No. 19 Devils struggling to take final step against top opponents

(Photo: Riley Trujillo/WCSN)

No. 19 Arizona State’s loss to No. 6 Stanford on Friday night can be viewed as a microcosm of the entire season for the Devils when they’ve gone up against top-tier opponents. They competed fiercely, and at many times were agonizingly close to securing a signature win, but when it came down to the few shots that would decide the game, the team executing did not have pitchforks on their uniforms.

With games decided by a combined eight points against Top-5 teams Baylor and Louisville or last night by seven against No. 6 Stanford, the Sun Devils have an abundance of quality losses.

Those defeats will look good to AP voters when they cast ballots toward the national rankings. However, nobody plays Division 1 basketball to lose pretty, and the frustration is starting to build for Charli Turner Thorne’s squad.

“It’s really frustrating because everyone on our team is very competitive and we want to win,” senior guard Courtney Ekmark said. “We’re right there and it’s our time to take them.”

These big game losses are especially frustrating for players like Ekmark, who transferred from then reigning national champion Connecticut to play at Arizona State. Ekmark has been a part of, and won, many big games throughout her college career. She knows as well as any member of this team that one of their greatest strengths is the experience they carry over the majority of their opponents.

ASU brought back the bulk of their roster and their leading three scorers from last season. That veteran presence was supposed to help the Devils close out the big games they would play in this year. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Yet with all the frustration and restlesness building in the locker room, head coach Charli Turner Thorne knows the team is just a step or two away from being able to flip the script on some of these games.

“These juniors and seniors have closed out plenty of big games,” Turner Thorne said. “So it’s not like ‘oh, we’re here for the first time,’ we just need to be consistent.”

ASU needs to find that consistency late in games, especially now, as they are in the midst of a potentially season-defining stretch that will have large bearing on their standing in the Pac-12.

Here’s the gauntlet the Devils will face over the next two weeks; No. 24 California, No. 5 Oregon and No. 10 Oregon State. If the Sun Devils can find a way to go 2-1 over these crucial three games, they’ll be in great shape for the Pac-12 tournament.

The later the Devils see these ranked teams in the conference tournament, the more likely it is they grab a No. 4 seed or above in the NCAA tournament. That would give the Devils an opportunity to host the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2016.

Having the advantage of the friendly confines of Wells Fargo Arena is a virtue that cannot be understated, but the players know they can’t get too far ahead of themselves.

Practices have been dedicated to making sure the players are sound fundamentally so that when the big moments come, the team can act on instict instead of tensing up.

“We have to do the little things first in order for the big things to fall in place,” said senior center Charnea Johnson-Chapman, who tied a career high with 16 points against Stanford.

Not knowing the basics can lead a team to look out of sync. In the first half against Stanford, the Devils didn’t seem anything like the team that took Baylor and Louisville down to the wire.

ASU shot an ugly 28 percent from the field in the first half, and took many bad shots on their way to a 12 point first half deficit.

“We’re so impatient with things that we tend to guard ourselves a little bit,” Turner Thorne said. “That’s not good enough to beat a final-four caliber team.”

It’s a quick turnaround for the Sun Devils, as the team will take on No. 24 California Sunday afternoon at home. Over these next three games, ASU must start the process toward closing games out, because close isn’t going to cut it in March.