Marquette Women’s Basketball Thumps Providence

You know what’s really helpful?

Opening up a game on a 13-0 run.

That’s what Marquette women’s basketball did on Saturday afternoon against Providence Friars. The Golden Eagles scored on six of their first eight possessions to take that lead and didn’t worry about all that much the rest of the way as they ended up with a 73-52 victory over the Friars. Marquette is now 14-4 overall on the year and 11-3 in the Big East. Thanks to other results around the conference, MU is now in third place in the league trailing 13-0 UConn and 8-2 DePaul.

It wasn’t a perfect run through of things at Alumni Hall in Rhode Island. Providence scored the last four points of the first quarter to get the margin down to 10 points, and then they got the first four of the second quarter, too. That left it 22-16 favoring MU with 8:03 to go before halftime. Marquette answered with eight straight of their own to punch the lead back to 14, and that turned into a 13-2 run by the Golden Eagles.

They were firmly in control at that point. A layup in the dying seconds of the half by Selena Lott made it a 17 point game at the intermission. That would be the closest that Providence got for the entire third quarter, and a layup by Mary Baskerville with 5:29 left in the game made it 59-47 favoring Marquette. PC would score just five more points the entire rest of the game, and that was that as the Golden Eagles blew the lead back north of 20 by the final horn.

Marquette was fine on offense in this one, doing enough to win by scoring a point per possession for the 73 possession game. Their defense did a tremendous job, holding Providence to just 41.7% effective field goal shooting and limiting the Friars to just 0.71 points per trip. The game was a little bit on the sloppy side with both teams turning it over on 23% of possessions, but Marquette’s dominance on the defensive glass helped turn the tide in their favor. For the second straight outing, Marquette has recorded a defensive rebounding rate north of 90% as they held the Friars to just two offensive rebounds for the entire game.

I opined in the preview that Marquette’s path to victory in this game would involve stopping Mary Baskerville. The Providence forward finished with 19 points, two rebounds, and two assists, and shot 9-for-13 from the field in 27 minutes. Buuuuuut she didn’t start this game and didn’t sub in until after Providence scored their first basket of the game to make it a 13-2 ball game. You can kind of make an argument that Providence head coach Jim Crowley went ahead and did Marquette’s job for them by keeping Baskerville on the bench while Marquette jumped out to that lead.

Selena Lott and Jordan King both scored 14 to lead the way for Marquette, who also got 11 points from Lauren Van Kleunen and 12 off the bench from Taylor Valladay. LVK may have had the best day after adding eight rebounds, five assists, a block, and a steal to the proceedings. Chloe Marotta’s 8/8/3 was pretty good as well, but the notable part was the junior forward going 2-for-2 from behind the three-point line. She’s 4-for-8 from distance this season, and another shooter developing into a thread would be very helpful for the Golden Eagles.

How about some highlights courtesy of FloHoops and GoMarquette.com?

Up Next: Time off! Since January 30th, Marquette has played seven games. That’s a lot! They won’t be back in action again until this coming Friday. MU will be back at home for the next two games including hosting Villanova this coming Friday. Tip off is set for 7pm Central, and FloHoops will have the broadcast. The Wildcats have not played a game since February 3rd, but they do have a home game against Butler scheduled for Tuesday.