Just when it looked as if Auburn may pick up its first conference road win of the season, the Tigers had their hearts broken once again. Arkansas’s Amber Ramirez scored with 0.4 seconds left to give the Razorbacks a come-from-behind 68-66 win at Bud Walton Arena on Thursday.
"We're getting closer and closer, so I am proud of my team how they came in here and fought,” said Auburn head coach Johnnie Harris. “But very disappointed in the loss."
With the loss, the Tigers fall to 9-13 and 1-10 against conference foes. The close game was nothing new for the Tigers, who have had 11 games decided by single digits this season. Auburn is 3-8 in those games.
Honesty Scott-Grayson led the Tigers with 23 points, a season-high for the junior guard. Scott-Grayson shot 10-for-16 from the field and played 37 minutes in the loss.
The Tigers, led by Scott-Grayson, started strong. Auburn opened up a 15-7 lead midway through the first quarter. Nine of Scott-Grayson’s 23 points came in the opening four minutes of the game.
Arkansas crept back into the game when Auburn went on a scoring drought of 2:46 near the end of the first quarter. Auburn only made one field goal, along with two free throws, in the final 5:34 of the first quarter and the eight-point lead was cut in half as the quarter ended.
In the second quarter, Auburn extended its lead over the Razorbacks with a combo of efficient offense and solid defense. Jala Jordan hit two three-pointers in the second period, which put the Tigers up seven.
Auburn had a 36-29 lead going into the locker rooms, as the Tigers held the SEC’s best scoring offense to just 29 points in the first half. Arkansas shot just 1-for-10 from behind the arc in the first 20 minutes.
"I was really proud of how my team came out and fought," Harris said. "I thought we came out and were really good offensively and defensively in the first half. We gave up some middle drives, but when you can hold an Arkansas team to 29 points in the first half, that's a pretty good job.”
The third quarter began much like the second quarter had ended. For Auburn, Scott-Grayson and Jordan were tough for the Razorbacks to stop. Scott-Grayson had eight and Jordan had five in the third, combining for 13 of Auburn’s 19 points in the frame, as the Tigers extended their lead to as much as ten and maintained a six-point lead going to the fourth.
But on the Razorbacks’ side, something had changed. Ramirez, Arkansas’s leading scorer, caught fire. After scoring eight points in the first half, Ramirez had 11 in the third quarter alone as the Razorbacks scored 20 in the quarter, their highest-scoring quarter of the game.
It may not have been noticeable in the third quarter, as Auburn matched the Razorbacks nearly basket-for-basket, but as the fourth quarter began, Ramirez’s impact was easily discernable.
"But then Ramirez got hot in the second half, they started going to her, she exploited some mismatches, and she got going,” Harris said.
Early in the fourth quarter, things went south for the Tigers. The Razorbacks went on a 12-1 run over the span of just over three minutes to change Auburn’s 57-49 lead with 8:30 to go into a deficit of 61-58 for the Tigers with 5:03 remaining. During the Arkansas run, Ramirez had seven of the Razorbacks’ 12.
Then, it was a back-and-forth contest for the final five minutes. The teams traded baskets and free-throws. Each time a team took the lead, the other responded. In the final 3:01 of the game, no team led by more than one point at any time until the winning basket was scored. It seemed as if the team who had the ball last would win, and that is exactly what happened.
Auburn had a chance to be the team with the final possession but turned it over with 3.5 seconds to go, giving Arkansas the chance for the final shot.
“But again, my team fought. We still had our chances. Then we had a bad turnover,” Harris said.
After Arkansas called timeout to advance the ball, they made sure to get it into the hands of Ramirez, who had already scored nine in the fourth quarter. Ramirez’s jumper from 10 feet away was banked in and the Razorbacks, with just four-tenths of a second left, celebrated a victory at Bud Walton Arena.
Ramirez’s winning shot was just the cherry on top of a 30-point performance, the third 30-point game of her career. Ramirez scored 22 in the second half, a time in which her teammates scored a combined 17 points.
The loss comes as a bitter pill to swallow for Auburn, who led for 34 minutes in the game. The Tigers, who have won just one of their last 22 conference road games, have two more opportunities to break that streak this season.
The Tigers will return to the friendly confines of home to face a surging Florida team on Monday. The Gators have won eight of their last nine games, with their only loss in that span coming to No. 1 South Carolina. Tip-off will be at 6 p.m. CST and the game will be televised by the SEC Network.
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February 11, 2022 at 09:09PM
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Tigers lose heartbreaker in Fayetteville - The Auburn Plainsman
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