Limiting chances
Panthers must do good job rebounding the ball to have chance of defeating top-ranked Axewomen tonight
The battle on the boards could go a long way to determine the outcome of tonight’s UPEI Panthers women’s basketball game.
The Panthers (2-4), coming off being swept last weekend by the Cape Breton Capers in Sydney, N.S., host the country’s top-ranked Acadia Axewomen, who were 6-0 before hosting St. FX Friday night.
The Axewomen averaged 12 more rebounds than any other Atlantic University Sport team entering Friday’s action and were averaging 20 on the offensive glass.
“We just can’t allow them to dominate the offensive boards,” Panthers head coach Greg Gould said Friday. “When you play good defence and the other team shoots and misses and then they get second or third opportunities that’s making it really tough on your defence.”
Tipoff is set for 6 p.m. and the game is worth four points in the conference’s unbalance schedule. It is the Panthers final game of 2017.
“We’ve certainly had a challenging first semester schedule and, obviously, it doesn’t get any easier tomorrow,” Gould said. “They’re playing like the seniorladen team that they are. They have a core of fifth-year players and they realize it’s their last chance to win a championship.”
Acadia is the conference’s highest-scoring team at 87.3 points per game while UPEI is averaging 67.
While the Panthers won’t walk the ball up the floor, they will try not to get into a runand-gun game either.
“I do think we have to be patient and take good shots,” Gould said. “We have to force them to play defence on every possession and we have to make shots if we’re going to be successful offensively.”
UPEI leads the country with the fewest turnovers at 12.2 per game and also gets a lot of points at the free-throw line.
Entering this week, the Panthers were third in the country in free throws taken and made and the two teams ahead of them had played two more games than UPEI.