... If, at the same time, we can maintain our proven defensive intensity, and Taiye can keep up her 15 rebounds per game, and Keke can continue to tear up the paint on drives and collect free throws (but refrain from 4th quarter turnovers and bad shots) ...
I forgot, in the above quote, one more obvious requirement for Gopher success. Clearly they also need to cut back on turnovers as well, since we've been turnover-prone all year. The 2017/18 team committed an average of 12.5 turnovers per game. That was an improvement over the average 16 turnovers from the year before, while in Rachel Banham's last year as a Gopher we had 13.2 turnovers on average. This year to-date we've averaged about 15.6 turnovers per game (and a slightly less 15.2 per Big-Ten game), the third-highest of the four recent years that I checked. So pardon the pun, but we need to "turn over a new leaf" with respect to turnovers. On average, each turnover throws away about whatever our average points per shot is. More importantly, turnovers often lead to fast breaks and easy points for the other team. Since we're good at steals, we could change the turnover scenario into a positive factor by consistently obtaining a negative turnover margin versus our opponents.
Also, here's some additional fun facts that I didn't think to look up til later on. Many of us may be interested in how some of our recent Gopher WBB graduates' Gopher stats stack up against their professional stats.
We start with Rachel Banham's last-year WNBA stats for the Connecticut Sun. Her three-point shooting for the Sun in 2018 was .370 as compared to .390 during her final year at Minnesota. You might say that's about the same, after allowing for the fact that the three-point shooting line is a bit deeper in the WNBA. For two-point shooting she was .533 for the Sun, and she was .868 on free throws. [Oh how the Gophers could use her free-throw shooting right about now, as only Pitts and Lamke (and probably Hubbard) shoot free throws that well.] She averaged 5.2 points per game off the bench for the Sun in an average of 12.8 minutes per game. But she did start a couple games, and (if I recall) scored 20+ points in one of those. She had a nice buzzer beater early in the season. In those average 12.8 minutes she also got 1.5 assists (about 4.7 assists per full 40-min game), .5 steals and .9 rebounds. Rachel's three-point shooting ranks a couple slots and half a percentage point above Maya Moore for the 2018 season. That puts Rachel in the 35th rank for three-point shooting (not including a couple players who took too few threes to count).
After playing pre-season for the MN Lynx (and making the best highlight shot of the entire season), Carlie Wagner played five games of pro ball in Spain for Quesos el Pastor Zamarat, before sustaining a knee injury and returning to the States. [No updates lately on the injury, which was more serious than initially thought.] During those five games she was shooting .350 from three and .542 from two. In her Gopher Senior year she was shooting .412 from three and .448 from two. She averaged 10 points (
https://basketball.eurobasket.com/player/Carlie-Wagner/Spain/Quesos-el-Pastor-Zamarat/343530?Women=1) per game for Zamarat. In her first two debut Spanish games, she scored 17 and 20 points, respectively.
Amanda Zahui B. plays in the WNBA for the New York Liberty. Last year she was shooting .500 from two and .344 from three (and she does shoot about 2.1 of those per game - she was not great at shooting threes in college and didn't shoot many). In her average 15.9 minutes per game she averages 7.7 points, 3 rebounds, but 1.5 turnovers.
Lynx power forward Rebekkah Brunson did not play for the U, but I mention in passing her last year's 6.8 rebounds in a typical 27.6 minute game (before being sidelined with a concussion). This computes to an average of .246 rebounds per minute of playing time. She's logged the most rebounds of anyone in the WNBA over her career (which is now in its twilight years). Lindsay recently compared Taiye Bello to Rebekkah Brunson in terms of both rebounding skills and heart. It's a great comparison - one that I'd noticed myself. By the way, Taiye often grabs rebounds at a rate of over half a rebound per minute of playing time. So Bello is currently rebounding at twice the rate of the WNBA record-holding rebounder. The comparison is not fair, though, since WNBA players don't miss nearly as often, so there's less rebounds to be had in the pros than in the college game. Nevertheless, the statistics do back up Lindsay's recent comparison of Taiye to Rebekkah. The Lynx Sylvia Fowles is actually tied with Liz Cambage to lead the WNBA last year with an average 12 rebounds per game. Rebekkah also is shooting .375 from three (slightly better than Banham), after coach Cheryl Reeve asked her to learn to shoot the trey. [She went from an average of one three-point attempt per year to the 30th ranked shooter from deep.]