Midway through the third quarter, Jaime Nared threw a bounce pass the left post that was intended for Mercedes Russell. Russell was trying to get around the player guarding her in the paint and couldn’t get to the pass in time before the team watched the ball roll out of bounds.
No one was in the vicinity of the pass, causing the crowd to let out a sad groan and Holly Warlick to throw up her hands in disgust.
This ill-timed give-away was just one of the 19 turnovers the No. 24 Lady Vols committed during the 62-56 loss to No. 3 South Carolina (24-1, 12-0 SEC) Monday night.
“What’s harder are the unforced errors, when you throw it and it goes out of bounds for no reason,” Warlick said after the loss. “I thought that we had some turnovers going into the post, but we didn’t bring the ball down, and you have to make a spectacular pass to be in the position where you’re throwing the ball. Just little things that we need to correct.”
The 19 turnovers immediately turned into points against the Lady Vols, as 16 of South Carolina’s 62 points came from take-aways.
The Gamecock’s 12 turnovers only resulted in six points from the Lady Vols.
“Nothing good is going to happen when you turn the ball over 19 times,” Warlick said. “When we’re being aggressive, I can take it. But not the ones where we just throw the ball out of bounds.”
Turnovers have doomed the Lady Vols (15-10, 6-6) all season. Tennessee’s turnover margin currently sits at a -2.75. This means that the team has an average of 2.75 more turnovers per game than their opponents, which is the third most in the conference. The Lady Vols turnovers committed total currently sits at 206. Their turnovers forced total is 173, which is tied with Florida for the lowest amount in the SEC.
“I thought we played, and we competed,” Warlick said. “We clean up the turnovers, and we’ll be in business.”
Starting Five Fiasco: Bashaara Graves, who started at the forward position Monday night, racked in a double-double by shooting 9-10 from the free-throw line and picking up 13 points with 10 rebounds and zero turnovers.
However, the rest of the Lady Vols starting five were sluggish, committing a combined 10 turnovers and scoring 16 points combined on 6-22 shooting from the field and 3-6 from the free-throw line.
Te’a Cooper, Andraya Carter, Mercedes Russell and Jaime Nared all couldn’t seem to find their footing against the Gamecocks. Although the loss doesn’t necessarily rest solely on the shoulders of these four ladies, one could ponder the possibility of a different outcome if the ball bounced a different way.
Still, Warlick stuck by her starting five after the loss and said that turnovers were what lost the game for the Lady Vols.
“We win in most of the categories except for turnovers,” Warlick said. “The margin of error against South Carolina has gotta be really, really small, and we just didn’t take care of the basketball.”
Blocking out the haters: As Monday night’s press conference was concluding, a question was posed to Andraya Carter about the backlashing the team has received from fans this year in connection with the third 10-loss season since 1985-86.
Carter gave a firm answer.
“A lot of fans forget that there was a team that lost 10 games and still won a national championship, and I think, if you look at our schedule and some of our losses, it’s not that we were not giving our all and we came up short,” Carter said. “In a lot of those losses, we’ve beaten ourselves or we were just stagnant or we just didn’t come to play.
Carter later continued, saying that fans and “people on the outside” just see the score.
“They see the L on the score sheet, but they forget there’s still a lot of time left,” the redshirt junior said. “There’s history behind us. We have former Lady Vols supporting us. We have support around us, and we have support in our locker room. And I believe that’s all we need.”
Up Next: The Lady Vols will host Ole Miss (10-14, 2-9) on Thursday with tipoff scheduled for 7 p.m. The team will then travel to LSU next Sunday to take on the Tigers at 2 p.m. That game is scheduled to appear on ESPNU.
Senior forward Bashaara Graves passes during the game against South Carolina.
