(Davon Marion / Fourth Estate)
Mason holds the Spiders to 37 points after recent loss
BY PETER MAHLER, ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR
Nine days after Richmond snapped George Mason’s undefeated Atlantic 10 streak with a 14-point loss, the Patriots evened the season series after surviving a 46-37 defensive battle on Monday afternoon against the Spiders.
Head Coach Vanessa Blair-Lewis knew exactly the type of game her team needed to play to defeat the high-flying Spiders.
“Our only key tonight was to play hard for 40 minutes, I don’t care about offense,” she said.
“If we’re not scoring, they’re not scoring. That was the mindset. 40 minutes. Relentless.”
Coming into Fairfax off an 11-game win streak, Richmond’s A-10-best scoring offense presented plenty of challenges for a Mason squad that missed 50 field goals in a Rhode Island loss on Saturday.
In their first meeting, three Spiders scored 15 or more points on the Patriot defense. However, Mason’s junior guard Kennedy Harris and senior guard Jada Brown scored 15 and 10 points respectively in the rematch, and zero Richmond players saw double figures.
With 7 combined blocks by both teams in the first quarter alone, the scoring was made especially difficult. Mason’s offense failed to get much going in the first ten minutes, shooting 4-of-19 from the field. Still, Richmond’s 4-of-13 performance wasn’t much better.
Mason held a 12-11 advantage heading into the second quarter, and neither team would shoot well for the remainder of the game. With both teams shooting under 30% from the field, the win would be determined by Mason’s slight edge in 3-point shooting.
When Mason did sink their shots in this game, it was with a splash. Nearly half of Mason’s buckets — eight of the 18 Patriot field goals — were scored from three, giving the Patriots a slim advantage in a low-scoring affair.
Mason entered the second half up 21-20 and went on a 9-0 run, solidifying a lead they would not relinquish. They outscored the Spiders 17-8 in the third and never looked back, with Kennedy Harris’s 8 points leading the charge.
Harris provided Mason with some much-needed offensive firepower, as her game-leading 15 points and three 3-pointers aided the offense when it was most needed.
Harris landed awkwardly on her right ankle late in the fourth, but managed to close out the game with 4 points in the final minutes, including a dazzling, one-legged floater immediately after returning to the game.
“We pulled through,” she said after the gritty performance. “It’s been a hard-fought battle this last week, so we came together, and we got the win.”
Standout junior forward Zahirah Walton had another unusually low-scoring game, mustering 4 points and making only 2 of her 13 shots from the field. Over the last two games, Walton has only made 5 of her last 26 field goals, averaging 5.5 ppg.
“We just keep telling her we believe in her … and so we focused on, ‘How can you still impact the game if your shots aren’t going in?’ I don’t want any heads dropping. I don’t want any of that,” Blair-Lewis said.
Walton made a tremendous impact on defense, showcasing her ability to perform well even when her shots aren’t falling. She had two blocks while defending driving layups, and her 7 defensive rebounds sparked momentum for her teammates on the fast break.
Mason’s rebounding dictated the flow of the game. Graduate forward Hawa Komara’s nine offensive rebounds not only extended Mason’s possessions but also kept the ball out of the Spiders’ grasp for long stretches of time.
In one instance late in the fourth, Komara recorded an astounding five rebounds in the span of just over a minute. After missing a free throw attempt, she even rebounded her own miss, maintaining possession and stealing away precious clock from the trailing Spiders.
(Davon Marion / Fourth Estate)
Richmond coach Aaron Roussell couldn’t help but commend Blair-Lewis’s defensive gameplan during his presser, noting the challenge his players faced moving the ball while also highlighting the impact of playing Mason twice in nine days.
“I think we got dribble happy tonight … George Mason was really great defensively,” said the seventh-year coach. “I thought they were on their assignments, they knew their game plan and they stuck to it really, really well.”
Roussell went on to say how much of an impact the Mason crowd had on his team’s psyche, with the Green Machine band showering their bench with heckles and jeers for the entire game.
For a program that has dominated the A-10 all season long with 75 points per game, their performance was shocking. Mason held the Spiders to their first sub-40-point game since their match against UMass in 2019, and they did it through aggressive switches, disciplined defense and instinctive rebounding.
The Patriots remain neck and neck with the Spiders as they compete for second place in the standings behind Rhode Island. Fans can watch Mason on ESPN+ when they face Loyola Chicago on Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 7 p.m.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Loyola Chicago was incorrectly referred to as being in last-place in the A-10. (Wednesday, Feb. 18, 3:34 p.m.)
