Blockton Clears 2,000 Points As #10 Marquette Crushes Xavier

A rousing team performance led to #10 Marquette women’s basketball getting the 90-44 victory over Xavier on Friday night, but this game will always be remembered for an individual circumstance. With 2:50 left in the third quarter, Selena Lott came up with a steal off an Xavier inbound, flipped it to Danielle King, who then flipped it to Allazia Blockton for the easy lay-in. It was a fantastically on-brand basket for MU under the direction of head coach Carolyn Kieger, which makes 9000% sense here: The bucket gave Blockton exactly 2,000 career points. She is the first Marquette basketball player, taking into account both the men’s and women’s team, to reach the 2,000 point mark. After finishing with 15 points, Blockton now has 2,004 career points.

Here’s the angle from the baseline:

And here’s a couple more angles from the Big East Digital Network broadcast.

Vaguely disappointed that all of these clips don’t have the Lott steal, to be honest.

Okay, so the game itself. As you saw from the score at the top of the page, it’s not exactly like this one was a barnburner. It started out patently bad, as the two teams combined to miss their first four shots of the game and turn it over twice. Bleh. Erika Davenport got the first points of the game on the board with a pair of free throws, Xavier’s Na’Teshia Owens answered with a layup on the other end, and then things got wild.

Natisha Hiedeman buried a three-pointer 11 seconds after Owens’ bucket to kick off a 19-0 run. It was actually wilder than that, as Owens scored at 8:04 to make it 2-2, and Marquette was leading 14-2 at the 6:55 mark when XU head coach Brian Neal said “hey, wait one damn second here” and called timeout. 69 seconds of action, 12 straight points for Marquette. Heck, it was only 58 seconds between Hiedeman’s triple and King’s J in transition to make it 14-2. FIFTY-EIGHT SECONDS TO SCORE TWELVE POINTS. Xavier turning it over three times helped. A lot.

Lott hit a three with 4:43 left in the first to make it 21-2, and MU ripped off six more in a row after the Musketeers broke the 19-0 run. That’s a 25-2 run and a 27-4 opening to the game. There’s 3:19 left in the first quarter and Marquette is up 23. The lead would wobble down to 18 a couple of times late in the first and early in the second quarter, and MU led by 21 at the half. To a certain extent, it’s clear that Kieger’s halftime message was “stop messing around,” as MU opened up the third quarter with a 13-3 run to take a 31 point lead, and the lead was up to 41 at the end of the frame.

You get the point.

The Golden Eagles spread things around incredibly well in this game, with no one playing more than the 29 minutes logged by Hiedeman. Davenport and Hiedeman led both teams with 18 points, and five Golden Eagles all tallied at least 11 points. Blockton told the BEDN’s John Fanta after the game that she was on a certain amount of restriction on Sunday against St. John’s as she returned from an ankle injury, but that wasn’t the case here. In her 19 minutes of action off the bench, Blockton was back to her usual self: 15 points on 6-of-10 shooting, six rebounds, three assists, and a steal. Davenport was ridiculous, recording her fifth straight double-double and finishing with 18 points and 19 rebounds, 12 of which were on the offensive end.

Up Next: Marquette heads into Indianapolis for a Sunday afternoon showdown with Butler, but that showdown is a little less exciting than it was on Friday morning. DePaul rallied from double digit deficits more than once on Friday night to hand Butler their second conference loss of the season and second straight Friday loss as well. While Marquette is now 8-0 and riding high in first place, the Bulldogs are 6-2, but alone in second place in the league. Thanks to the favor from the Blue Demons, Marquette has an opportunity to make a major separation between themselves and the rest of the conference at the halfway point of the schedule.