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Behind a pair of 23 point performances from Allazia Blockton and Natisha Hiedeman, top seeded Marquette women’s basketball got past #4 seed Georgetown in the 2019 Big East semifinals on Monday afternoon. With the win, Marquette has moved on to the conference tournament championship game for the third straight season.
This was a wild, wild, wild game at Wintrust Arena. Here is a list of the runs in this game in chronological order:
Georgetown 7-0
Marquette 22-2
Georgetown 6-1
Georgetown 12-2
Marquette 17-3
Georgetown 9-0
Marquette 7-2
I mean, WHAT IN THE HELL WAS GOING ON OUT THERE? Marquette closed the first quarter on a 13-0 run to lead by 10 and tacked on seven more to start the second.... and yet the halftime score was 39-36 favoring the Golden Eagles. Ultimately, I guess this is just standard issue Georgetown vs Marquette basketball, because James Howard has some sort of weird karma kryptonite when it comes to coaching against Carolyn Kieger.
Marquette got the lead back to 20 when the fourth quarter started thanks to a pair of freebies from Hiedeman with one second left, but that lead was not safe. It would blossom to 21 with 7:41 left to go on a layup by Hiedeman, but just over three minutes later, Dionna White made it a nine point game, 66-57, and this was clearly nowhere near over.
Blockton answered White with a bucket of her own 23 seconds later, and drew the foul, too. It would turn out that the lead wouldn’t go back underneath 10 again.... but that doesn’t mean anyone was comfortable about it. Thankfully, Marquette’s defense held over the next two minutes, getting two turnovers and two missed triples from the Hoyas over that stretch. By the time Brianna Jones scored to break up the scoreless streak for Georgetown, she was trimming the lead to just 14 with two minutes left. That made it pretty much academic from there.
Blockton and Hiedeman, the 2018 and 2019 Big East Players of the Year, were exactly as great as Marquette needed them to be in this situation. They combined to shoot 15-for-32 on the day, with an 8-for-17 mark from long range. Have fun trying to solve that equation. They added 17 rebounds, seven for Hiedeman and 10 for Blockton to give her a double-double as well.
How about some highlights, courtesy of FS1 and GoMarquette.com?
Up Next: Marquette plays in the Big East championship game on Tuesday, and here’s what I can tell you about that right now. It will tip off at 7pm Central, and the broadcast will be on FS1. Past that, things are still up in the air. As of this writing, DePaul has a 68-61 lead on Creighton with 4:30 left to play in the other semifinal. Obviously, the winner advances to play Marquette. MU swept the season series against the Blue Demons, winning easily in Milwaukee without Allazia Blockton and winning less easily in Chicago with a full and healthy roster. The Golden Eagles split the season series with Creighton, knocking off the Jays in Milwaukee in the first game that Blockton missed with her ankle injury, but losing in Omaha with Erika Davenport already done for the season with her knee injury in the second to last game of the regular season.