ASU women's basketball failed to protect its home court advantage, as the No. 8 Oregon Ducks (26-4, 15-2 Pac-12) pulled away with a 57-44 win on Friday night.
For the Sun Devils (19-10, 10-7 Pac-12), the team looked to improve upon their home 13-1 home court record. Head coach Charli Turner Thorne thought her team could win this game.
“This is the first time we’ve gotten to play a team like this at home,” Turner Thorne said. “We have played plenty of top ten teams this year and top 15 have all been on the road.”
ASU proved itself early on, lead for a large portion of the first half. The team's strong defensive game held the Ducks to 57 points for a team that averaged more than 80 points per game.
“I thought we had a good defensive effort,” Turner Thorne said. “We out-rebounded them and we wanted to out-rebound them by seven or eight and we did, we were just really off offensively.”
The Sun Devils recorded 41 rebounds to Oregon’s 33, and saw opportunities to go on runs and pull off an upset.
However, the Sun Devils could not capitalize on the offensive side as they shot 31 percent from the field, which featured missed layups and bad bounces.
ASU's leading scorer was junior forward Kianna Ibis. She finished with 13 points and added five rebounds. Another Sun Devil who played well was junior center Charnea Johnson-Chapman. Chapman finished with a career-high 14 rebounds and added seven points.
“We just were not aggressive enough on the offensive side and we were not really connected,” Ibis said.
The Sun Devils' 25-24 halftime lead quickly turned into a deficit as the Ducks caused Sun Devil turnovers and capitalized on those opportunities. In the third quarter alone, the Ducks scored 20 points.
For Oregon, sophomore guard Sabrina Ionescu continued her impressive form from last season, leading the Ducks with 16 points and 8 assists.
“They came out swinging and we had to take a punch and swing back,” Johnson-Chapman said. “We couldn’t do that at first, we kind of let them get a little bit more energy than we had … we should have picked it up.”
In both games vs Oregon, ASU was unable to get out of a funk in the third quarter, giving the Ducks a pathway to victory. In the first game, Oregon outscored ASU 21-5 in the third, and on Friday the Ducks did it again — this time 20-8.
“It’s a different quarter of a different games for us,” Turner Thorne said. “I think it was coincidental … our games against top 10 teams, we have consistently had one quarter where we’ve let up and every other quarter we have outplayed them.”
The regular season ends Sunday as the Sun Devils take on the No. 17 Oregon State Beavers (22-6, 13-4 Pac-12) at 2 p.m. MST before preparing for the Pac-12 tournament in Seattle. On Sunday, a lot is on the line for the Sun Devils. A win guarantees the team the five seed in the Pac-12 tournament and would mark the team's fifth straight 20 win season.
Reach the reporter at sbemanue@asu.edu or follow @SebastianEman24 on Twitter.
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