Attacking, driving, scoring
Golden Eagles take shooting seriously
Skinned elbows and knees. Scratched corneas. A kick to the forehead. A trainer with a pad and a shove. A coach with a strange wrist cast.
These are some of the things that make Marquette great at shooting the basketball.
It takes about 20 minutes of watching the Golden Eagles women’s team to see very clearly that they have determination and work ethic, but they also have something else really special going on.
“We are a very offensively talented team,” said coach Carolyn Kieger, whose Golden Eagles (25-7) open NCAA Tournament play vs. Quinnipiac (27-6) at 12:30 p.m. Saturday in Coral Gables, Fla.
The Golden Eagles can score — in any way, from any range. They don’t shy away from contact, or degree of difficulty. They will score. And that’s a collective declaration.
Leading scorer Allazia Blockton (17.2 points per game) shoots 47.1% from the field and is joined by fellow sophomores Natisha Hiedeman (13.9, 41.1%), Erika Davenport (12.9, 57.2%), Danielle King (11.4, 47.0%) and Amani Wilborn (9.9, 45.3%). Five other players also shoot above 40% – a solid indication of good shooting in this game.
As a team, Marquette shoots 46.1% — 14th-best in the country entering the NCAA Tournament.
Marquette also is ranked No. 14 nationally with 2,537 points scored this season, an average of 79.3 per game.
How does MU — so young, with just one senior — pull this off? Well, for some players, it was ingrained in their youth. For others, it was learned.
Wilborn loves to attack from the right. She’s so athletic, she can elevate herself over her defenders. Playing for a boys AAU team as a kid, and against four older brothers, basketball for her was always a contact and collision sport.
“And my brothers are all over 6 feet, so playing against those high hands just made me want to attack more,” said the 5-foot-9 Wilborn.
King shares her teammate’s grit. She’s 5-5 and against Creighton in the Big East tournament she drove into the lane and got so low on a shot she took a kick to the face.
“I went to head-fake and her leg, it was No. 5, hit me in the forehead,” said King.
King shook it off quite literally. She’s from Chicago. Need we say more?
“In Chicago, the style is always attack,” said King. “They teach guards to attack the rim as if you’re just as tall as everybody else.”
You will not keep King out of any area of the court, but her sweet spot is a pull-up in the lane,.
“Defenses either try to take away the three or they take away the rim, so it’s easier to stop right there — in the middle — instead of going in to the trees all the time,” King said.
“But if I see a lane, I’m going to go all the way.”
Some players had the toughness from their youth as well but needed to develop a shooter’s touch. That was Hiedeman.
“I had bad shooting form before I got to Marquette,” said Hiedeman. “I was shooting with both hands.”
Kieger got Hiedeman a wrap that essentially rendered her thumb useless, and while cumbersome Hiedeman patiently shot with it for a summer.
“I started to just use my pointer finger as my last release point,” said Hiedeman. “Now my rotation on the ball has better backspin. Before, I had side rotation. Now the rotation has backspin which gives the ball a better chance to go in if it just bounces off the front of the rim.” Hiedeman is a sharpshooter. “I wouldn’t say I make the three all the time … but I’m takin’ it!” said Hiedeman, who has made 74 of 200 threes this season (37.0%).
Davenport, on the other hand, is “all about around-the-rim,” the 5-11 post player said.
She is the team’s highest-percentage shooter, but she pays for it sometimes. Against DePaul in the Big East tournament, Davenport and the rest of the bigs went up for a rebound, and she took a fingernail to her eye. The scratch was so bad she couldn’t see. So she came out, right?
No. The staff gave her eye drops and applied a protective contact lens and she returned to the game, helping MU to an 86-78 win.
A fierce rebounder who loves to battle, she usually goes against taller people, but Davenport also has been working with Kieger to get her best shots.
“Coach has been trying to get me to dribble into a defender so I can create my own space to go up,” said Davenport. “And get an even easier shot.”
And then there’s Blockton. Given she put up 2,000 points in high school and now leading the Golden Eagles in scoring, the assumption might be that scoring comes easily.
Truth is, Blockton goes to the Al McGuire Center with an assistant coach three mornings a week to work on shooting. Then she works with her trainer Durrell Johnson four nights a week, when he will hold up a big pad and give her a nudge as she’s driving to the basket, forcing her to practice contact and adjustment of her shot. These 90-minute sessions are all in addition to Kieger’s regular practices.
“Even though I’m good at attacking the basket, you can never get too comfortable,” said Blockton. “When I don’t get a lot of high reps after practice, I kind of feel less confident. I like to build my confidence — because I know I’m the go-to person to hit that gamewinning shot. I want to feel confident in knocking it down.”
All of these offensive fireworks of course come from the efforts of Kieger, who, while as an assistant coach at Miami, talked offense every day with the coaching staff. It took her all of her first two years at Marquette to install this dribble-drive, read-and-react offense to get to this point, where players are making the reads and seeing the options now in her third year.
“We talk a lot about taking the right Marquette shot,” said Kieger. “Our players are really buying into that. We’re more efficient. We could score last year — but we weren’t as efficient as we are this year.”