PHILADELPHIA – Janiah McKay scored a season-high 21 points, and the Auburn women's basketball team held off a furious late rally by St. Joseph's to pick up an 81-70 win on the road Thursday night.
At 7-1, the Tigers are off to their best start of the Terri Williams-Flournoy era and their best since the 2008-09 SEC Championship team won their first 20 games. But the victory was not without its tense moments as St. Joseph's (3-6) went on a tear in the second half to nearly erase a 15-point Auburn lead.
"We have a certain type of mentality where it doesn't really bother us," Williams-Flournoy said. "We play the same way whether we're up 20 or up one. Now that's what we've got to work on. But we continued to fight, we made plays when we needed to make plays, and we hit shots when we needed to hit shot. St. Joe's played hard, they played extremely hard.
McKay's 21 points led all scorers and she was key in the fourth quarter when she scored nine points and hit 6-of-8 free throws in the closing minutes.
"A few times she needed just one more dribble to get a full layup, but we knew they would have trouble with one-on-one containment," Williams-Flournoy said. "We knew that we had to attack them. They like to control the tempo and slow it down a little bit. I think we sped them up and made them score more points."
Auburn had five total players in double-figures for the second straight game. Daisa Alexander finished with 16 after an 11-point first quarter, Crystal Primm scored 14, Unique Thompson had 12 and Brooke Moore added a season-high 10. Thompson was Auburn's leading rebounder with six.
The Tigers led by as many as 15 in the third quarter at 49-34 but saw St. Joseph's go on a furious tear, hitting eight shots in a row and 12-of-14 over a stretch that spanned the third and fourth quarters, to cut the lead to just one at 65-64 with just over six minutes to play.
But Auburn would finally get some defensive stops and put some distance between themselves and the Hawks, going on a 9-0 run to take a 74-64 lead with 2:52 left. The run was punctuated by a steal and fast-break basket by redshirt freshman Kiyae' White, drawing a huge cheer from a group of friends and family from her nearby hometown of Macungie, Pa.
St. Joe's cut it to four points again at 74-70 after a pair of treys, but Auburn took care of business at the free-throw line in the final minute to put the game away.
Both teams started hot from the floor with Auburn scoring on the game's first eight possessions and shooting 75 percent in the first quarter to take a 30-16 lead through 10 minutes. Things slowed down considerably in the second period and the Hawks got hot from outside – seven first-half 3-pointers – but St. Joe's was only able to cut the deficit to 12 points as Auburn took a 42-30 lead to the locker room.
Auburn shot a season-high 53.7 percent from the floor and was 18-of-23 (78.3%) at the free-throw line. The Hawks, meanwhile, scored a season-high 70 points – 20 points above their season average – while making a season-best 13 3-pointers. Alyssa Monaghan led the Hawks with 18 points, all coming from 3-pointers.
After a nine-day break for final exams, Auburn will be back in action Sunday, Dec. 16, when the Tigers host Samford at Auburn Arena. Game time is 2 p.m. CT.
