This post was updated Feb. 9 at 12:22 a.m.
Bubblegum, bubblegum, in a dish.
Five seconds, four, three, two – shoot.
Miss.
Wolverine guard Syla Swords ran to the perimeter in the bright, magenta shoes every player was wearing as part of Michigan’s Pink Game on Sunday.
But her game-tying attempt from deep flew wide, and the Wolverines would not touch the ball again.
In a showdown between the Big Ten’s top two teams, No. 2 UCLA women’s basketball (23-1, 13-0 Big Ten) hung onto a 69-66 win over No. 8 Michigan (20-4, 11-2) at Crisler Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by the film of a gum bubble. With the win, the Bruins retain sole possession of first place in the conference and extend their lead over the Wolverines to two games.
“Michigan’s a really good team,” said coach Cori Close, who described Sunday as an Elite Eight-level matchup. “They gave us all we could handle. So credit to them, in that they made us better. … We found ways to win, to go into a hostile environment, and really, especially in the second half, do it with our defense.”
Despite entering Sunday with the conference’s best offense and boasting a 33.9% success rate from deep, the Wolverines finished shooting 5-for-21 from beyond the arc – including 12 consecutive missed shots that spanned the entirety of the second and third quarters, plus nearly half of the fourth quarter.
Ironically, it was deep shots that allowed Michigan to trim what was once a 13-point deficit with just over a minute left in the third quarter to a three-point margin with 16.6 seconds to go – credit to Swords’ and guard Olivia Olson’s back-to-back 3-pointers in the final 30 seconds of regulation.
“These are all things that we’re going to learn from,” Close said. “We didn’t do a good enough job at all. We let them come to us at the 3-point line, instead of dictating and going to them.”
The duo combined for all five of Michigan’s baskets from deep, and Olson’s 20 points pushed her past the 1,000-point mark, just 57 games into her collegiate career.
Meanwhile, the Bruins were powered by senior center Lauren Betts’ ninth double-double of the season, with 16 points, five assists and season-high-tying 16 rebounds. Senior guard Kiki Rice, senior guard Gabriela Jaquez and graduate student guard Gianna Kneepkens got in on the offensive effort, too – racking up 20, 13 and 12 points, respectively, to round out UCLA’s double-digit scorers.
“We have to be prepared for whatever the game is giving us,” Rice said. “Today felt like some threes weren’t falling, shots weren’t falling, but that’s kind of the specialty of our team. We have so many people who can score, so many ways we can score.”
Michigan took a 17-13 lead into the second quarter thanks to UCLA’s 33% clip from the field and 1-for-6 shooting from beyond the arc – both well below its season averages of 52% and 38.5%, respectively.
But Kneepkens helped turn the tide in the second quarter, making all four of her shots from the field, including two from deep.
With an 8-0 run early in the second frame, the Bruins caught the Wolverines by the toe, and set them running in the wrong direction, retaking the lead for the first time since Jaquez’s game-opening bucket and holding on the rest of the way.
The Bruins had turned the ball over nine times to the Wolverine’s five by the break – including off a Kneepkens travel, a Rice travel and a Rice double dribble – but the point differential off turnovers remained separated by just one.
“We talked a lot about locking in defensively (after the first quarter),” Rice said. “At the beginning, they were playing harder than us, so we just had to step that up and match and raise the level of intensity.”
The Bruins seemingly tagged the Wolverines with their ice-cold 3-point shooting after the first quarter, as Michigan cooled to an 0-for-7 performance in the second frame and 0-for-4 effort in the third.
While the Bruins continued to bounce back from their first-quarter performance like rubber, the Wolverines’ offense remained stuck like glue until the waning minutes of the afternoon.
“They were playing really aggressively with us, so I was like, ‘Why don’t we do the same thing back?’” Betts said. “Once we started rebounding and locking in on taking away their best players … that was just really important for us.”
Had one of the Wolverines’ dozen straight missed 3-pointers gone their way or Swords’ final attempt found the net, Sunday could’ve ended in an upset.
But the bell, or rather buzzer, rang.
Recess was over, the taste of bubblegum faded into imagination and the Bruins had won.
