Georgia women’s basketball coach Joni Taylor rarely allows her thoughts to stray from the No. 20 Lady Bulldogs’ next opponent, but she’s not ignoring the bigger picture coming into view.
With four games remaining -- including Thursday’s 7 p.m. clash with No. 8 South Carolina (20-5, 9-3 SEC) -- Georgia (21-4, 9-3 SEC) has checked off a number of action items on its preseason to-do list, but there’s still a lot more on the docket to be accomplished.
The Lady Bulldogs have thus far set themselves up for a favorable seed in the NCAA Tournament (along with four or five other SEC teams) and the worst thing they could possibly do at this point is grow content.
“If you look at the big picture, we’re still second (in the league standings),” Taylor said Tuesday. “But at the same time, we thought we could be second. So we have to make sure we don’t get complacent with that…We knew we were capable of that.
“Sometimes we can get caught up in, ‘Oh, my God, you’re still in second place – nobody thought you would be there.’ Yes, we did. So there are still things we have to work on and correct, but that being said, you can never be too up and you can never be too down. We’re still in a good place and we control our own destiny, but we’ve got a lot of tough games remaining.”
“At the beginning of the season, we sit down and predict and project what we want to do this year,” added senior guard Haley Clark. “From Day 1, we looked at the big picture and laid it all out. So from here it’s kind of day by day because at the beginning of the season we laid out what we wanted so it’s a matter of focusing on the goals we’ve set.”
After Thursday’s game at Stegeman Coliseum, Georgia closes the regular season against Ole Miss (11-14, 1-11), Alabama (15-10, 5-7) and Florida (10-15, 2-1).
But heating up on the front burners are Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks, who had three exhausting games last week and are playing shorthanded, but are still as dangerous as ever.
“They’re the defending national champs for a reason,” Taylor said of South Carolina, which is riding a seven-game winning streak over the Lady Bulldogs. “They’re very well-coached, and they’ll be well-prepared. They’ve got the best player in the country in A’ja Wilson. She can score on the perimeter. She can bring the ball up the floor. She can post up, and she can face you and drive on you. We’re going to have our hands full.”
Wilson, a 6-foot-5 senior, leads the SEC in scoring with 22.7 points per game and is third in the conference in rebounding, averaging 11.5 points per game. But if any team – the Lady Bulldogs included – devote too much energy and attention to Wilson, they do so at their own peril as Alexis Jennings (11.7 ppg, 7.1 rpg) and Tyasha Harris (11.6 ppg, 3.2 rpg) are more than ready to step up.
“If you look at their shot attempts, Wilson and Harris are taking a lot of shots, but with the other players, it’s pretty evenly distributed with how they shoot the basketball,” Taylor said. “It’s going to be a tough challenge for us.”
Georgia catches a slight break with the announcement last week that South Carolina’s Lindsay Spann, the team’s best 3-point shooter, is lost for the season with a knee injury. In their 64-57 victory Sunday over Florida, the Gamecocks used only eight players, four of whom played in excess of 30 minutes.
The Lady Bulldogs counter with senior Mackenzie Engram (13.1 ppg, 6.4 rpg) and junior Caliya Robinson (12.6 ppg, 7.5 rpg) and a host of supporting players who have done an admirable job taking on various on-court responsibilities, some of which don’t always show up in the final stats.
After taking it on the chin in a 64-46 loss Sunday at No. 11 Tennessee in a game where they shot less than 30 percent from the field and were outrebounded 50-30, the Lady Bulldogs’ mandate for Thursday is evident – don’t give up second and third shots and take care of the basketball.
“They’re hard enough to handle the first time around,” said Taylor. “We can’t give them multiple opportunities or turn it over and give them easy points in transition.”
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