Defence wins championships.
That’s the motto the Pakenham Warriors Championship Women would surely be telling one another after locking down McKinnon to advance in the post-season.
Pakenham suffocated the Cougars to run out and win 93-68 at Cardinia Life on Saturday.
McKinnon entered the contest known as a perimeter-centric team, having made the second most three pointers in the league on the largest volume.
The team also features league-leading scorer Emily Lytle, who averages 22.7 points per game on 47 percent shooting.
Both teams operated on the interior in the first, with either side recording 12 points in the paint to knot the score at 26 at quarter time.
However, a tall defensive second term from the hosts restricted scoring avenues for the Cougars, helping the Warriors build a nine-point advantage at the half, 54-45.
McKinnon shot just 33 percent from the field and turned the ball over seven times to flip the game.
The visitors cut into the lead in the third and disaster struck for Pakenham with star big Eliza Hollingsworth exiting the game with an ankle injury and not returning.
Hollingsworth was dominant up to that point, already recording a double-double of 13 points, 11 rebounds and four steals in just 21 minutes of action.
Without one of their key pieces, the Warriors dug deep and gradually pushed out the margin with two key sources at the forefront – Grace Graham and Skye Rees.
Rees stepped up to the plate with an increased workload as a big, finishing with 21 points and six rebounds on 69 percent shooting.
“I’ve known Skye for a very long time and she plays on instinct and that’s really hard to defend,” Pakenham head coach Elli Gibson said of Rees.
“In this league she’s really tough for opposition, she can crash the O-boards and get one-on-one isolations, she’s just so dangerous.
“We’re lucky she’s on our team.”
Graham provided a game-high 29 points and the hosts continued to disrupt the McKinnon offence, building up the buffer and closing out the victory.
For the game, the Cougars shot below 33 percent from the floor and recorded 15 turnovers to just 10 assists.
“We trusted the process and trusted that our half court defence will keep us in a good place, we didn’t need to gamble,” Gibson noted of her side’s mindset defensively.
“It showed we were able to get stops and convert pretty quickly down the other end at times.
“Everyone followed an individual scout on where we wanted the ball to go.
“It was just a matter of calculations and where we would prefer the ball to be, we did that extremely well and we were really switched on.”
Lytle scored a team-high 24 for McKinnon but she struggled with her efficiency, going just 6/25 with four turnovers.
This included figures of 3/16 shooting from two-point range.
“She’s tough, she’s up there with Grace for MVP of the league this year,” Gibson said of Lytle.
“She’s got so many weapons and our gameplan was just to force her into as many tough shots as we could and I thought our girls did that.
“She’s always going to get her 20, it was just about making them as hard as we could and just to tire her out and outrun her down the other end.”
It wasn’t just the starters that brought the heat for Pakenham.
Gibson had high praise for her reserves, admiring the role they played in the result.
“The girls off the bench brought such exceptional energy,” she said.
“They come on the court and they move off the ball so well and I reckon once we got some penetration and hit some receiver spots it worked and credit to them, they stayed with it.
“I thought we outran them in the fourth and got a fair bit of transition.”
The bench unit included rising stars and Youth League-listed players Chelsea Schreuder and Stella O’Loughlin, who both had strong impact.
O’Loughlin scored nine points and hauled in four boards, while Schreuder had three rebounds, three assists, two steals and the third highest plus-minus on the team with plus-22.
“They were exceptional, they did everything that I asked of them and everything the team needed,” Gibson said of the pair.
“They’ve been playing well for us all year, their minutes have been up and down and no matter the duration of their minutes, their impact is always so influential.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the two Youthies, they just came in and were instant energy and made extremely good decisions on the floor, they were vital for us to get that win.”
The Warriors will head to Bellarine to play the first-placed Storm for a place in the Championship Grand Final on Saturday at 7pm.
