Nailed it! Orrange helps take down No. 1
TOP 10 PLAYS OF 2014 5. Clutch 3 propels Stanford over UConn
Down by 10 points with a little over six minutes left, Stanford appeared to be on its way to only a moral victory against mighty UConn.
The top-ranked Huskies came into the Nov. 17 game as twotime defending national champions. They had two preseason All-Americans on the court — last season’s national player of the year, Breanna Stewart, and Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis.
Stanford, ranked sixth at the time, looked like the inferior team most of the way. But it rallied and cut the lead to one on three occasions before Morgan Tuck put Connecticut up 77-74 with two free throws with 11.8 seconds left.
“I was surprisingly calm when I took the shot.” Amber Orrange
Finally, the Cardinal were down to their last shot, and it had to be a three-pointer. The ball went to Amber Orrange on the right wing. Momentarily left unguarded, the left-handed guard coolly nailed the threeball with 1.4 seconds left, one of the most dramatic shots in Stanford history.
The Huskies didn’t get a shot off before regulation time expired. In the overtime, Orrange provided the go-ahead jumper with 1:37 left, and Stanford secured an 88-86 victory.
The upset snapped UConn’s 47-game winning streak and gave the Cardinal a shot in the arm in the early part of the season when they were adjusting to life without two-time Pac-12 Player of the Year Chiney Ogwumike.
Many women’s basketball observers thought the Huskies were capable of going undefeated, as they had last season and three other times since 2001.
Orrange’s trey on Nov. 17 and the overtime aftermath ended that talk only two games into the season. Perhaps the most soft-spoken of the Stanford players ignited the crowd of 5,367 at Maples Pavilion.
“It meant a lot,” she said recently. “I think it showed how competitive our team is. When we really focus, we can play with anybody in the country.”
It was the only three-pointer she made that night, in two attempts.
“I was surprised she was wide open,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said.
The play was designed for Bonnie Samuelson, the team’s best three-point shooter. But Moriah Jefferson left Orrange to join with Tuck in a doubleteam of Samuelson at the top of the key. Samuelson quickly passed to Orrange, who let it fly before Jefferson could recover.
“I was surprisingly calm when I took the shot,” Orrange said. Why was that? “There wasn’t much time left on the clock,” she said. “I didn’t have time to think about whether it would go in or not.”
UConn called a timeout, but a shot from nearly mid-court by Stewart was well short.
“We didn’t just lose to a team that doesn’t have any good players,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “Sometimes, because of who we are, the biggest story is that we lost, not that Stanford played great and won, and that would be unfortunate. That would be a disservice to Stanford, but that’s the reality, that’s the world that we’re in. ... We lost to a really good team, a better team than people would probably give them credit for.”
Four years ago, Stanford snapped UConn’s 90-game winning streak 71-59 behind Jeanette Pohlen’s 31 points. Pohlen also had one of the most significant Stanford shots of recent years. Her buzzer-beating layup after a court-long dash beat Xavier 55-53 in a 2010 NCAA Tournament regional final and sent the Cardinal to their third straight Final Four.
Orrange has hit clutch shots before. In the 2013 Pac-12 title game, she scored on a spinning drive with 8.3 seconds left for a 51-49 win over UCLA. Last season, she converted a threepoint play with 28 seconds left to clinch a 76-70 win over No. 3 Tennessee.
Against UConn, Orrange played a team-high 42 minutes and scored 17 points. “I didn’t notice being tired during the game,” Orrange said. “I felt it after the game.”
The two teams gave the fans in the stands and a national TV audience a rare early-season thriller. “I think people got their money’s worth in that game,” VanDerveer said.