GA News: OnlineAthens - Lady Bulldogs beat Ole Miss for fourth-straight victory

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From OnlineAthens.com
February 7th, 2016 05:35 PM

On Jan. 10, Georgia stood at 0-3 in the Southeastern Conference and was at the bottom looking up at everyone else. Fast forward four weeks and the Lady Bulldogs are part and parcel of an entirely different storyline.
With a 70-56 SEC victory Sunday over Ole Miss at Stegeman Coliseum, Georgia (18-6, 6-5) won its fourth consecutive game, inched beyond the .500 mark in the conference for the first time this season, and filled the hole it dug for itself in early January.
The Lady Bulldogs – who on Sunday matched their SEC victory total from last season — were able to do it with an effective zone defense, although Ole Miss (10-13, 2-8) did score 24 points from beyond the 3-point arc, and an offense that relied on the long-range shooting of Tiara Griffin and gritty inside play from Shacobia Barbee and Merritt Hempe.
“It feels good — like a breath of fresh air to finally be able to get over that hump,” Hempe, who had 17 points, said of crashing the .500 mark in the league. “Last year, we had our tough go of games at the end of the season, which really hurt us, but…this year we had it at the beginning of the season and it allowed us to learn a lot of things.”

Griffin led all scorers with 19 points (including 5 of 9 shooting from beyond the arc) and Barbee produced her eighth double-double of the season with 12 points and 15 rebounds. Ole Miss had but one player in double figures, Madinah Muhammad, who finished with 15 points, a dozen of which came from 3s.
Griffin, who has now recorded 204 treys in her career, said that because of Ole Miss’ 3-point abilities, she and her teammates did not feel they had the game in hand until very late.
“We never really got comfortable because a lot can happen in one or two minutes,” she said. “We just stuck it out and played through and stayed with the gameplan.”
Earlier in the week, Georgia coach Joni Taylor fretted that her team — which has started to exhibit the kind of consistency expected of a senior-heavy squad — might not match the intensity displayed in consecutive victories over Auburn, Vanderbilt and No. 20 Missouri, and she told the Lady Bulldogs that Sunday’s game was not just important, but critical, to their postseason aspirations.
“I was extremely worried,” Taylor said. “We have a tendency to play to the level of our competition and we blew some chances on the road at Alabama and at home against LSU that were games I think we should have won, so on paper we should have beat Ole Miss and we did, but that was very concerning going into the week."

“So the message to the players was, ‘We dug ourselves out of a hole when we started 0-3 in the SEC. And now we’re 5-5 with a chance to be 6-5 and a tie for fourth place. Let’s make sure we know where we are. This is a game (the NCAA tournament committee) is going to look at, so we’ve got to take care of business.’ So I feel much better now than I did leading up today.
Tied 30-30 at halftime, the Lady Bulldogs went back and forth with the Rebels for the first five minutes of the third quarter and then broke away with a considerable advantage in the final 15 minutes of play. Hempe made one of two free throws at the 5:20 mark of the third quarter to put Georgia up 45-35 and the Lady Bulldogs led by 14 points twice during the period.
In the fourth quarter, Griffin hit a 3 in the opening seconds to put the Lady Bulldogs up by 15 at 59-44 and Georgia continued to stay stingy, limiting the Rebels to but 12 fourth-quarter points, seven of which came in the last three minutes of play.
“Ole Miss is extremely athletic, and they’re streaky shooting the basketball, so we felt what gave us the best chance to win was playing a zone, so we played a zone for the full 40 minutes,” Taylor said, noting the Rebels threw up 28 3-point attempts. “Ole Miss came out and hit some shots and made it uncomfortable for two quarters and even into the third, but we made adjustments and were able to get more stops and let our offense carry the day for us."

Georgia got off to a strong start in the first quarter as Hempe and Barbee combined to put the Lady Bulldogs up 6-0, but Ole Miss stuck with the 3-pointer and kept pace, tying the game at 8-8 on a trey by Shandricka Sessom and going ahead at the 5:55 mark on a layup by Shequlia Joseph.
The two teams traded the lead for the remainder of the period but in the last 90 seconds, the Rebels pulled ahead on a jumper by Bretta Hart and a 3-pointer by Joseph to go up 17-14 at the end of the first quarter.
Once again, the Lady Bulldogs were a house afire opening the second quarter, collecting nine unanswered points to go up 23-17, but Ole Miss outscored Georgia 13-7 in the final six minutes, with Sessom hitting a jumper with 49 seconds left to put the Rebels up 30-27. Griffin, who finished the first half with six points, hit a 3 with 30 seconds left to tie the game at 30-30.
Georgia shot 48 percent (13 of 27) from the field in the first half, a bit better than Ole Miss’ 40 percent, but the Rebels connected on five 3-point attempts to maintain pace. The Lady Bulldogs were guilty of nine turnovers, which Ole Miss turned into 13 points. On the other hand, Georgia was only able to post four points off the Rebels’ eight miscues.


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