Photo courtesy: Quinnipiac Athletics
By: Josh Silverman
They say revenge is a dish best served cold. The Quinnipiac Bobcats walked into the Hynes Center in New Rochelle, N.Y. ready to serve that dish to the Iona Gaels on a silver platter.
Quinnipiac faced Iona for the first time since losing to it in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference finals last season. From the tip, Quinnipiac didn’t look like a team that had waited 327 days to rematch its conference rivals.
In a 58-44 defeat, Quinnipiac had no answer for two of the MAAC’s best.
“Their two best players really showed up today in a big way and we couldn’t handle them,” Quinnipiac head coach Tricia Fabbri said. “They were really good and on their A game today. We get a couple weeks to learn from this and game plan for them moving forward.”
The first, sophomore guard Alexis Lewis, who recorded a double-double in the first half and finished the game with 22 points and 15 rebounds. Lewis connected on more three-pointers (four) than Quinnipiac made as a team (two). Lewis’ athleticism and rebounding was too much for Quinnipiac to handle.
The second Gael, senior guard Marina Lizarazu, will also be joining Lewis in Quinnipiac’s nightmares. The veteran picked up the slack when Lewis was in foul trouble and finished with 24 points. In Lizarazu’s 12 free throw attempts, she made as many (ten) as Quinnipiac made in their 25 attempts.
The duo outplayed Quinnipiac’s deep roster and scored 46 points combined, two more than Quinnipiac’s entire team.
The top two rebounding team, as seen above, went head to head today. Even though Joy Adams, the MAAC’s all team leader in rebounds, graduated last year, Iona was still able to record nine more rebounds that Quinnipiac.
As great as Iona was, Quinnipiac only has itself to blame. It went 10-for-25 shooting free throws (40 percent) and missed all ten shots from behind the arc in the first half before finishing the game two-for-19.
Iona head coach Billi Godsey was able to take away what Quinnipiac does best.
“We’ve been really locking in defensively recently and we’ve been making sure we tune into it in practice. It’s about understanding what the first option is for Quinnipiac and trying to take it away.”
Something that Quinnipiac prides itself on is its depth, however that came back to haunt them today with only one player scoring in the double-digits.
“Someone is going to get that hot hand and we didn’t have that hot hand or consistent buckets,” Fabbri said. “We weren’t able to get anything consistent.”
The bottom line is that Quinnipiac lost to Iona in the categories that matter the most: shooting percentage and rebounds.
Not being able to get revenge on Iona will stay with Quinnipiac.
“It’s going to sit in the crawl of our throat for a long time. We just asked (the team) to reflect.” Fabbri said.
Quinnipiac will try to regroup before traveling to Fairfield to take on the Stags on Feb. 2. Quinnipiac swept Fairfield last season and beat them earlier this month by five.
