SAN JOSE “”mdash; To advance through the Pac-10 Tournament and
possibly earn a bid to the NCAA Tournament, the UCLA women’s
basketball team knew it had to lean on juniors Nikki Blue and Lisa
Willis to get it there. But even the Bruins were surprised to the
extent Blue and Willis were forced to carry them on Saturday
afternoon. Of the 71 points UCLA scored in its heartbreaking 73-71
loss to Arizona State in the conference tournament in San Jose, the
Bruin tandem scored an astounding 61 of them. “I
wouldn’t have thought that would have been the case, that we
basically wouldn’t have scored besides Nikki and Lisa,”
UCLA coach Kathy Olivier said. “I just asked Lisa and Nikki
why they couldn’t score 63 points.” Yet even though the
Sun Devils knew exactly where UCLA was turning to for its offense,
they were helpless in stopping Blue and Willis, who slashed and
picked Arizona State’s supposedly vaunted defense apart. With
the ball rarely leaving their hands, the Bruin duo scored 40 of
UCLA’s first 45 points and shot a combined 22-for-42 from the
field for the game. But as has been a constant problem for the
Bruins this season, no one else on UCLA’s roster helped
shoulder the burden on offense. After Willis and Blue, the rest of
the Bruins combined to shoot a paltry 4-of-23 on Saturday. While
Olivier ideally would have liked to have seen a more well-balanced
performance on offense, she was not about to take the ball out of
her best players’ hands, not when they were torching the nets
and the Sun Devils. But despite a career-high 36 points from Blue
and a season-high 25 points from Willis, the two monstrous
individual efforts were simply not enough to advance the Bruins
into the next round. “They are two great athletic players,
but this is not an individual sport,” said Arizona State
guard Kylan Loney, one of four Sun Devils to score at least eight
points. “It’s a team sport, and we were the team that
wanted it more today.” While Blue and Willis did more than
what was asked of them, the rest of the Bruins chose an inopportune
time to hibernate on offense. After freshman Lindsey
Pluimer’s seven points, the only other player to score was
freshman Lauren Pedersen (three points), whose putback of an
offensive rebound with 1:42 left was the only field goal by a Bruin
other than Blue, Willis or Pluimer. In contrast, eight Sun Devils
made it into the scoring column as opposed to only four Bruins.
“They took a lot of shots,” Loney said of Blue and
Willis. “They’re great players, and we only hoped to
contain them.”
QUINN SIGHTING: Before Saturday’s game, injured standout
sophomore Noelle Quinn took to the floor and participated in
warm-up drills with her teammates. Saturday marked the first time
since Jan. 16 that Quinn had been dressed in uniform, and though
she was not medically cleared to play, her presence on the floor
inspired her teammates, not mention put a scare into Arizona
State’s players. “People thought we were trying to pull
something, but I was just warming up to see how it felt,”
said Quinn, still recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery on her
left knee. “A couple of my teammates told me the (Sun Devils)
looked a little scared when they saw me.”
GOING OUT WITH A BANG: If the Bruins do not earn a bid to the
NCAA Tournament, which with a 16-12 record appears unlikely, it
will be the second consecutive year in which Blue had a dominating
performance in her team’s final game. On Saturday, the junior
went 14-for-29 from the field en route to scoring 36 points, also
adding five rebounds and four steals. Last season in the opening
round of the NCAA Tournament, Blue put up 33 points on 12-of-21
shooting in the Bruins’ 92-81 loss to Minnesota.