The Alabama women’s basketball team lost to the LSU Tigers at home 51-46 in the Tide’s annual Power of Pink game. With the loss, Alabama falls to 11-15 and 1-11 in the Southeastern Conference.
Alabama came out strong in the first half, relying on stifling man-to-man defense to enter halftime 27-22. Alabama forced 10 Tiger turnovers in the first half, held the Tigers to 33 percent from the court and kept the Tigers scoreless in their first four possessions. Head coach Wendell Hudson said the defensive performance was dominating.
“I thought defensively, we played awful well,” Hudson said. “I thought we took LSU out of a lot of stuff that they wanted to turn. We pressured them. When we could, at times, man-to-man them, it was really good.”
Foul trouble, missed shots and missed scoring opportunities prevented Alabama from taking control of the game in the second half. Junior Kyra Crosby played only 19 minutes before being ejected for committing a foul on an LSU player.
From there, Alabama had trouble maintaining a consistent lead due to personnel problems. Alabama shot 18 percent in the second half compared to 34 percent in the first half. The Tide got away from the suffocating defense and opportunistic scoring that helped the team gain the lead in the first half.
Despite the missed opportunities, Alabama managed to hold onto a slim one-point lead with roughly three minutes remaining in the game. The Tigers then held the Tide to one point in the final minutes.
Juniors Meghan Perkins and Shafontaye Myers led Alabama in scoring with 10 points apiece. Alabama was out-rebounded 46-37 and committed 25 fouls.
For Perkins, the game was lost to missed opportunities.
“We played hard,” Perkins said. “We just missed a lot of opportunities we should’ve got. We didn’t move the ball as well as we should, but we played hard overall…In the second half, I think we kind of just got out of what we were doing in the first half. We didn’t really adjust well to that.”
Hudson said much of the same concerning his team’s second half performance.
“We got out of sync,” Hudson said. “[When Kyra Crosby was ejected from the game], everybody was kind of looking around. We were really out of sync, and some people really played too many minutes.”
Still, the prevailing thought for Perkins wasn’t that LSU won the game, but that Alabama lost it.
“We did good,” Perkins said. “Just not good enough.”
