Idaho has been counting down the minutes to this day — Literally.
Back on familiar ground, the defending Western Athletic Conference Tournament champions picked up where they left off last March with their fourth consecutive victory in Las Vegas dating back to last seasons run through the final.
Dominating from the start, the Vandals did what a 15-1 in WAC play team should have done against an 0-16 team in WAC play team, easily advancing to the WAC Tournament semi-final with a 84-43 win over Chicago State.
“One game down, two to go out here,” Idaho coach Jon Newlee said. “Just to be able to have the experience for some of the players who haven’t played out here, to come to know that we’ve been anticipating the game out here.”
Commemorating their arrival in Las Vegas, the Vandals wore warmups with “!20” written on them — The number of winning minutes required to bring home another WAC Tournament championship.
The warmups had been the motto earlier in the year for how many minutes remained in the conference season, Newlee said, but the team wanted to start it over in Vegas.
The result was the same Idaho demeanor as the last two times out against Chicago State, which were both 50 point victories where the Vandals topped 90 points.
Idaho coach Jon Newlee was down to only eight players due to an injury to freshman forward Brooke Reilly, and he used them all.
No Idaho player played over 30 minutes, which was by Newlee’s design.
Sparsely used guard Agueda Trujillo Fernandez played 19 minutes in place of Connie Ballestero and WAC Player of the Year Stacey Barr. She put up 13 points, following her 19 point performance against Chicago State last Thursday.
“For the players who haven’t been here before it was nice to get this one out of the way,” Barr said.
If Newlee could find any criticism of his teams’ latest dominant conference performance, it’s a second half in which his team let up, which is something Newlee said he doesn’t do.
Idaho only outscored Chicago State by three points in the second half after jumping out to a 54-16 halftime lead.
“It’s hard when you’ve beaten a team that badly twice and then it’s going that way again, to keep that intensity level,” Newlee said. “If I had to take something negative away from the game it would be the intensity drop. That would be it, everything else went pretty well today.”
Idaho will play noon on Friday.
Other notes
– Freshman post Brooke Reilly is still out with a hip injury. Newlee said she is day to day and that the team hopes to have her back Friday, if not Saturday should Idaho qualify for the conference championship game.
“Brooke is doing everything she can to get back and be there on Friday. She was making good progress until we got down here, we’re hoping to get that back and hopefully big improvement in the next couple of days. It would be nice to have her if possible,” Newlee said.
– Christina Salvatore tied her career high with six 3-point makes on Wednesday. All of her field goal attempts were from beyond-the-arc. She led all scorers with 18 points.
– Idaho was a 3-point shot short of tying the WAC Tournament record for 3s made in a game, set by Fresno State.
– Sophomore Ali Forde had a double-double in her 27 minutes of action with 15 points and 13 rebounds.
Quotable
Jon Newlee: “I thought first half was certainly was one of our better halves of the year, best offensively in terms of moving the basketball, making good decisions out on the floor. Liked our defensive intensity in the first half, think we were ready to play, proud of getting after them like we did to start the tournament.”
Christina Salvatore on her 3-point shooting mentality: “Just try to knock them down. I try to shoot them the same way everytime, just going into the game I wanted my form to be right, the ones I missed I knew why I missed, my teammates did a great job of reminding me.”