Canada to play for seventh after second-half stumble
Canada will come sputtering home carrying a large measure of disappointment from the women’s world basketball championship.
Once again undone by a bad fourth quarter, Canada lost 76-71 to China on Saturday morning and now can finish no better than seventh in the 16-team tournament.
Coming off a fifth at the 2014 worlds and back-to-back top-eight finishes at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, Canada must beat Nigeria on Sunday in Tenerife, Spain, to finish seventh.
For a team that harboured legitimate medal hopes and put advancing out of the quarterfinals as its biggest goal, the result, no matter whether it’s seventh or eighth, will sting.
“This is a very young team and these are really, really tough lessons to learn but the world is very good at basketball and we’re learning that right now,” said Kim Gaucher, who was appearing in her fourth world tournament.
A day after mustering just three points in the entire fourth quarter of a loss to Spain that dashed their medal hopes, the Canadian women scored only 23 points in the second half — nine in the fourth quarter — while letting a comfortable lead slip away against China.
Canada led by 14 points at the half but was outscored 42-23 in the final two quarters.
“We’re going to regroup and put forth our best effort tomorrow to finish as high as we possibly can in this tournament,” Canadian coach Lisa Thomaidis said. “Every team here is really good and unfortunately we didn’t have the consistency of effort to sustain the lead we built in the first half.”
Kia Nurse had 18 points to lead Canada while Natalie Achonwa had 13 and Jamie Scott 10. Canada made seven of 24 three-point field goal attempts, shot just 39 per cent from the field overall and committed 13 turnovers.
Li Meng led China with 18 points and Han Xu added 12.
If there was any lingering disappointment over Friday’s loss to Spain, it took a while for Canada to show it. Scott had all 10 of her points in about a three-minute span of the first half, Canada poured in 29 points in the second quarter and led 48-34 at the break.
Canada’s inability to string together a series of defensive stops allowed China to get some confidence and quickly close the gap, and Canada couldn’t recover.