PULLMAN, Wash. (November 12, 2021) – For most of the game's opening 30 minutes, Northern Arizona and Washington State simply traded brief runs with neither side able to break away from the other.
Tied on six occasions, it wasn't until the closing minute of the opening half that the Cougars broke away by more than four points. While the Lumberjacks erased the seven-point advantage, drawing even once again with just two minutes remaining in the third quarter, the Cougars finally pulled away with a 10-0 run thanks to a 3-pointer just before the third-quarter buzzer and the opening two minutes of the fourth quarter.
Holding off Northern Arizona for a 62-54 victory, Washington State escaped the first ever meeting between the programs Friday afternoon in Pullman, Wash. For the Lumberjacks, the season opener proved to be a mixed bag as they held the Cougars to just 31.6 percent shooting from the field while committing 22 turnovers leading to 19 points for Washington State.
"We talked about that at halftime. We had 14 turnovers at half, which that's kind of our game goal to be under 14 turnovers. To see that number at half was a little bit daunting," said Lumberjacks head coach
Loree Payne. "It's a big piece for us to get those extra possessions. You cut our turnovers in half and cut down half of the o-boards we gave up, and that's 20 extra possessions for us. We are pretty efficient when we get those possessions."
Efficient is exactly what the Lumberjacks were through the first half of the game. Shooting 48.1 percent from the field, Northern Arizona hung close to Washington State despite attempting 11 fewer shots across the first 20 minutes.
Separated by just one possession through the first eight minutes, a pull-up jumper by
Miki'ala Maio, a three-pointer for
Nina Radford and a layup by
Khiarica Rasheed gave Northern Arizona the largest lead of the game, 15-11, to that point. While Washington State answered with seven straight points of its own, a pair of layups by
Nyah Moran pushed the Lumberjacks back to a 23-20 lead before bounced back to enter halftime leading 32-27.
Washington State's 6-foot-3 center Bella Murekatete scored nine of her 13 points in the second quarter to push the Cougars back in front, with Northern Arizona needing much of the third quarter to pull back even.
Though the Cougars lead never ballooned to more than seven points until the end of the quarter, with Washington State held scoreless for nearly a three-minute stretch, the Lumberjacks' strong shooting from the first half failed to carry over.
Hitting just 28.6 percent in the third, Northern Arizona relied on the free-throw line to finally erase the deficit. Radford tied the game at 39-39 with 2:03 left in the quarter, only for a 9-2 run by Washington State to effectively put the game away.
Washington State shot just 27.8 percent in the fourth quarter, but the 14 points was enough to hold off Northern Arizona's final push after raising its game-high lead to 15 points with 3:47 remaining.
"I felt like that was the thing that really kept us in the game," Payne said of the team's defense. "For us to hold a Pac-12 team to that low of scoring is a huge growth area for us. Defense was a challenge for us last year, so we are in a position where we are really challenging our kids to be a little more aggressive defensively."
While Murekatete hit 6-of-12 from the field, no other Cougar could break the 40 percent threshold. Charlisse Leger-Walker, Washington's leading scorer and the Pac-12 Freshman of the Year in 2021, led the team with 22 points while shooting just 7-of-22 from the field and 2-of-9 from three-point range.
Radford led the Lumberjacks with 13 points in her first game since the end of the 2020 season, while Moran and Rasheed each added 10 points and five rebounds. Eight different Lumberjacks scored while 10 played, including
Teionni McDaniel,
Sierra Mich'l and
Fatoumata Jaiteh making their Northern Arizona debuts.
The Lumberjacks head across the state of Washington as they conclude their first road trip of the season with a game against the Washington Huskies on Sunday at 3 p.m.
