Samuelson hasn’t lost faith in shot
UConn’s best shooter hopes to regain her touch vs. No. 23 Owls
Nobody has to read off the numbers to Katie Lou Samuelson. The highly-motivated leading scorer for the top-ranked UConn women's basketball team is fully aware that connecting on shots has become more of a chore in the last couple of weeks.
Samuelson had connected on at least one 3-pointer in each of the season's first 21 games culminating with a streak of 13 games with multiple treys in a game. Both of those runs ended after the first meeting of the season with Temple. With the Huskies preparing to host the 23rd-ranked Owls on today at the XL Center (7 p.m., SNY), Samuelson is looking to get back into rhythm offensively.
Twice in the last five games she failed to make a 3-pointer as she is shooting 32 percent from long distance during that span. For many players, that shooting percentage number would be a cause for celebration, but not for a player shooting better than 43 percent before hitting this recent cold spell.
Samuelson spent the much of Tuesday's practice working on going to various places on the court with more of her shots coming inside the 3-point line.
"I worked on it at the beginning of the season of doing different things to create my shot," Samuelson said. "I have to consistently do that in practice because once I get away from doing it every day, you can see it in the games that I stand around more but when I doing it in practice I can feel myself doing it more in games.
"I have to be able to do other things even if I don't score. Sometimes if I don't score, I don't impact the game as much as I could. Missing shots kind of comes and goes, I have been through this before in high school, There are definitely periods where I haven't shot as well. There are times when I shoot well in practice and in games they don't fall. I have been trying to get shots up but I am not too caught up with it because I know I will keep missing if I think about it too much."
UConn is expected to be without Kia Nurse for at least the next two games as she rests her tender right ankle. Nurse recently moved ahead of Samuelson for the team lead in 3-point percentage and her absence on the perimeter makes it somewhat easier for teams to throw an additional defender at Samuelson. That is what Tulane did on Saturday.
"When you are a really good shooter, you are only as good as the people around you so if you have the ability to put three other people on the perimeter or two anyway where they have to be concerned with those players," UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. "All of a sudden you are being concerned with a player being guarded 1 on 1 by everybody and you can figure out a million ways to get Lou shots. When there is nobody else making any shots on the perimeter, now Lou is being guarded by three guys. How do we help Lou? Well, the other guys make some shots."