By Jarra Gojolo — Content Editor
Despite being 5-foot-5, Ayzhiana Basallo has no problem rising to the occasion.
She scored the game winning basket with .3 seconds remaining, as San Jose State women’s basketball (12-6, 5-1 MW) defeated UNLV (8-9, 4-2 MW) 62-60 on Wednesday.
Playmakers, Making Plays
With eight seconds left in regulation, the Spartans put the ball in their leading scorer’s hands. And one of the nation’s most productive guards produced once again.
“[Tyra Whitehead] was supposed to set me a screen, [Raziya Potter] was a second option,” Basallo said. “Just get a bucket. If I couldn’t, just pass the rock. But I ended up doing it, I look up, and it went in, and everybody’s coming towards me, and I couldn’t believe it myself.”
Many people on SJSU’s bench could believe it either.
“Ayzhiana’s one of a kind,” associate head coach Alle Moreno said. “She’s a hooper, she loves to take over in moments like that. I think that’s what she lives for. She loves competition, there’s nobody [else] in the world that probably wants the ball in their hands in that moment.”
With the Spartans at 5-1 in the Mountain West — the lone loss being in overtime to first-place Fresno State — they have the potential to make some noise in March, beginning with the Mountain West Championship.
The promising start to this season is a 180-degree turn from the Spartans’ previous season. They’ve already exceeded their conference win total from all of last year, not even halfway through their Mountain West schedule.
“We were picked last to finish in the conference,” Basallo said. “We’re just dogs and we’re just gonna be dogs until the end of the season … We just know that, whatever team plays San Jose State, it’s gonna be a tough game for them.”
Locking Up
The Rebels scored 23 points in the third quarter on 10 of 13 shooting, out-rebounding the Spartans 8-3.
“We knew, second half, that we needed to pack our defense inside and not let them get any second-chance points,” Megan Anderson said. “And we needed to secure rebounds and get stops.”
Check, check … and check.
The Spartans held UNLV to just 6 points in Wednesday’s fourth quarter, as the Rebels shot only 2-for-10 from the floor and only pulled down four rebounds to SJSU’s nine.
What went down between the two periods?
“We’ve been known for our third quarter this year, that one of the few times we’ve lost a third quarter,” associate head coach Alle Moreno said. “For our girls to buckle down in the fourth quarter, they communicated more on the defensive end, our rotations were sharper, our ball screen defense was a little sharper … we just executed a little more.”
UNLV came into Wednesday’s game as a team well known for their defense, holding Mountain West teams to a conference-low 59 points per game before Wednesday. SJSU’s grind-it-out effort Wednesday pushed the normally high-scoring Spartans up to seventh in the conference in defending Mountain West squads (68 points allowed per game).
When The Shot’s Not Falling
The Spear columnist Austin Turner called this SJSU basketball team an “offensive juggernaut” earlier in the season and that label has held true so far. The Spartans are a top-20 offensive team in the nation scoring at almost 79 points per game.
At 37 percent on the season, they’re just outside the top-20 in shooting the three.
But when the offense isn’t firing on all cylinders — like on Wednesday and during Saturday’s game against Colorado State — the Spartans have overcame it.
In the first quarter, SJSU struggled to score, missing multiple looks around the basket as they finished the first quarter shooting only 27 percent from the floor. But the Spartans took the lead by halftime, on the back of 57 percent shooting from the floor, despite the team’s — and conference’s — leading scorer only having three points.
I guess she was saving them all for crunch time.
“Especially for me, if I’m not making shots I need to do other things,” Basallo said. “[Tyra Whitehead] always tells me that I could do other things, assist, rebound, defense.”
After UNLV raced ahead in the third quarter, both teams were mired in a fourth quarter slugfest on the backs of Basallo and defense, with the home team coming out victorious at the end.
“That’s the advantage of being at home,” Moreno said of the Spartans’ slow start. “On the road, you do that and maybe the score doesn’t end up in the same favor. But being home and having the good atmosphere that we had tonight, that’s huge.”
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