Veteran leadership propels win

The IU women’s basketball team was embarrassed on the glass and in transition by Purdue the first time the teams met Jan. 31 in West Lafayette, a 59-42 Boilermaker win.

A group of veteran players made sure it would not happen again.

Senior Jasmine McGhee scored a game-high 26 points, including the game-winning jumper as time expired to upset Purdue 62-61 Thursday night in Assembly Hall.

“It feels great,” senior Aulani Sinclair said. “To be able to get that win with my team and us couple seniors and juniors —  We’ve been through everything together, the highs and the lows.

“Just to do that with them and to be able to check it off my checklist, of being here, it’s just a great feeling.”

What made McGhee’s heroics possible, though, was the dirty work done in the paint by an experienced group of post players.

The team’s longest-tenured player, fifth-year center Sasha Chaplin, scored 10 points and grabbed four rebounds off the bench.

Junior forward Milika Taufa scored just two points but grabbed a team-high 10 rebounds. Forward Linda Rubene, a senior, had six points and seven rebounds.

IU outrebounded Purdue 35-33, erasing memories of the first meeting, when Purdue won the battle on the boards 45-30 and 22-8 on the offensive glass.

“What really helped was watching that first game with them and seeing how well we played defensively to first shot misses, but we got dominated on the boards,” IU Coach Curt Miller said. “We couldn’t complete the defensive possession with a defensive rebound up there. We got a lot of first shot misses.

“Our confidence was high that if we could get them out of transition and get them in the half court, that we had a chance to get them to miss some shots. It was a matter of could we be tough enough and rebound against them all night.”

Miller said after the loss to Purdue his team was badly outhustled and played sloppily. Twenty IU turnovers led to a 23 points off turnovers for the Boilers. Purdue had 14-2 advantage in second chance points.

Thursday, IU took better care of the ball and matched the Boilermaker’s intensity.
The Hoosiers committed just 13 turnovers and forced  12 Purdue miscues. The Boilers had a narrow advantage in points off turnovers, 14-12, and tied IU in second-chance points, 14-14. 

“All week, Coach Miller and the coaching staff preached rebounding, outrebounding, outrebounding,” Chaplin said. “In our first game, that’s the reason that they pulled away and beat us was because of rebounding and turnovers.

“Tonight, we controlled what we could do, that’s crash the boards and rebound.”

Sinclair is the team’s leader and its leading scorer. But McGhee is a large piece of the puzzle as well. Miller has previously talked about McGhee being the “Robin” to Aulani Sinclair’s “Batman.”

This time, their roles flipped. Sinclair responded with an efficient game.

Sinclair scored 16 points on 6-of-11 shooting, including 3-of-5 from beyond the arc. She seemed to come up with a big shot every time Purdue threatened to take control.
Then, the ball would be in someone other than Sinclair’s hands with the game on the line. It would have to go to the hot hand.

Robin became Batman, and Batman had to be the sidekick.

“We knew we hadn’t won against them in a long time and tonight, you could see it in our eyes and just the way we were playing them, we knew were not going to lose this in the final couple of minutes,” she said. “We all dug in deep like we needed to do this entire season.”