Mississippi State women's basketball began SEC play Thursday night, and it was a performance that the Bulldogs would like to quickly move on from. State fell to #16 Kentucky 91-69 in a game that was largely never competitive. The Bulldogs are now 13-2 on the season and 0-1 in the SEC.
Mississippi State women's basketball had no answer for Kentucky's offense
Mississippi State had played fantastic defense throughout their non-conference slate, but that did not show against Kentucky Thursday night. The Cats, who entered the game shooting just 29.6% from three, put on a three-point shooting clinic, going 18-33 from distance. Dazia Lawrence and Georgia Amoore each had seven three-point makes, scoring 28 and 27 respectively. Kentucky was nearly automatic from the charity stripe, making 21-25 free throw attempts. Perhaps State just caught Kentucky on a hot shooting night, and this will be an outlier. But it was by no means a good defensive performance.
The Mississippi State Bulldogs couldn't get their own offense going in Lexington
The Bulldogs' own offense struggled mightily, shooting 35.6% from the floor and 26.7% from three with only four makes. They didn't have a ton of turnovers and did a solid job securing offensive rebounds, but they simply couldn't make shots. Quanirah Montague was the lone efficient scorer with 13 on 5-6 shooting off the bench. Jerkaila Jordan, Eniya Russell, and Destiny McPhaul all hit double-figures, but none shot better than 33%. MSU got no offensive production elsewhere. With Kentucky shooting as well as they did, that wasn't going to cut it.
It's not going to get any easier for Mississippi State women's basketball
State will need to quickly regroup from this loss because they've got tougher teams than Kentucky on deck. Defending national champions and #2-ranked South Carolina comes to Starkville on Sunday. Then a week from now, a top-10 Oklahoma squad will come to town. Some slightly more manageable games follow, but State really doesn't want to start 0-3. And even if that happens, they need to at least be more competitive than they were tonight to get back some momentum.