GREENVILLE, S.C.— Auburn fought back in the second half but could not overcome a big halftime deficit, falling to No. 24 Ole Miss 73-57 Thursday night in the second round of the SEC Women’s Basketball Tournament.
“They kind of stuck it to us in the first five minutes,” Auburn head coach Larry Vickers said. “We didn’t do a very good job responding to the ball pressure.
“We knew coming in that we wanted to own the first quarter, and we knew the physical style of basketball that they play. We didn’t rise to the challenge early into the basketball game.”
The Tigers trailed by 28 at halftime but whittled the Rebel lead down to as few as 12 in the fourth quarter, ultimately outscoring Ole Miss 37-25 in the second half.
“I was happy with the second half as far as the way we responded,” Vickers said. “I felt like we did a good job fighting back and competing. We want to exit this tournament with our head up.”
Khady Leye had a second straight big game in the tournament, finishing with a team-leading 17 points and eight rebounds. In two tournament games, Leye finished with 28 points and 23 rebounds.
“We’ve got to play hard from the start until the end,” Leye said. “We cannot wait until the second half to start playing hard. We’ve got to bring that dog mentality from the start and carry it out to the end.”
Kaitlyn Duhon added 14 points and five rebounds and was a perfect 8-for-8 at the free-throw line.
She also had five rebounds and six steals, putting her over the 100-steal mark for the season. Duhon is the second player in Auburn history with 100-plus steals in a season.
Shooting was a struggle for Auburn as the Tigers finished at 33 percent (17-of-52) with four 3-pointers on 12 attempts. Auburn did a good job getting to the free-throw line, especially in the second half, where they finished 19-of-27.
The Tigers’ defense forced 22 Ole Miss turnovers that turned into 16 Auburn points.
But Ole Miss shot 63 percent in the first half, dominating both the paint and the outside game. The Rebels would cool slightly after halftime but still finish at 53 percent for the game with seven 3-pointers; six of those came in the first half. The Rebels out-rebounded Auburn 40-23.
After trailing 48-20 at the half, the Tigers opened the third quarter on a 7-0 run and ultimately cut the deficit to 58-37 after three.
Ole Miss opened the fourth with a bucket, but Auburn went on another 10-0 run from there, getting within 13 on an A’riel Jackson layup. Then, at the 5:00 mark, Sania Richardson hit a corner 3 to make it 65-53, the closest it had been since early in the first quarter. But Auburn was unable to cut into the deficit any farther.
Christeen Iwuala led Ole Miss with 18 points, going a perfect 8-for-8 from the field.
The Tigers ended their SEC Tournament run at 15-17 overall. After the game, Vickers reflected on his first season as Auburn’s head coach.
“Depth is so important in this league,” he said. “Concern number one is to try to get deeper going into next year. We have to get a lot bigger. We want to get deeper. We want to add some more talent on the perimeter. We’re just going to start from day one and push the buttons on the things that we need to fix because this league is super tough.
“We have to get bigger, we have to get deeper and we have to become a better rebounding basketball team. That’s definitely my priority moving into the portal. Those are the main things that we’re going to look at as we build into year two.”