With the Terrapins women’s basketball team boasting a comfortable lead at Purdue late in the fourth quarter Tuesday night, guard Shatori Walker-Kimbrough came off a down screen from center Brionna Jones and received a pass at the three-point arc.
The 5-foot-11 junior sat at 38 points on the night, two shy of becoming the second player in Terps’ history to score at least 40 in a game.
So as soon as Walker-Kimbrough caught the ball on the right wing, forward Kiah Gillespie and guard Kiara Leslie jumped out of their seats across the court, encouraging their teammate to pull the trigger. After all, Gillespie had been nagging Walker-Kimbrough about reaching 40 since halftime.
“We’re like, ‘Tori, we’re going to fight you if you don’t get 40,'” Gillespie said.
Moments later, Walker-Kimbrough saw the ball fall through the hoop — just as it had so many other times throughout the night — to send the Terps’ bench into a frenzy. It marked her only 3-pointer of the contest on four attempts.
In falling one point short of matching former guard Marissa Coleman’s single-game scoring record, Walker-Kimbrough shot 17-for-21 from the field and made all but one of her seven foul shots. But instead of launching long-range jumpers like she did against Wisconsin and Penn State — she combined to make 11 of her 13 treys in those contests — Walker-Kimbrough’s historic scoring performance came mostly inside the three-point arc.
“She made the game look really easy,” Gillespie said. “She was scoring on all cylinders — layups, pull-up jump shots. … It was just amazing to watch.”
Walker-Kimbrough leads the nation with a 57 percent three-point percentage, and she admitted to being more of a shooter earlier in the year. It’s easy to stay on the perimeter, she said, because of the open shots she gets when the defense collapses on Jones.
Plus, point guards Chloe Pavlech and Brene Moseley’s driving abilities force opponents to rotate over, leaving Terps shooters with extra space.
As the season has progressed, however, Walker-Kimbrough’s made an effort to penetrate more, which she was able to do in transition against the Boilermakers early on.
After taking a steal coast-to-coast for a layup less than a minute into the game, two of her next three buckets came from slicing through the defense and getting to the rim. In fact, she scored the Terps’ first 11 points in the game’s opening minutes.
“I just wanted to come out aggressive,” Walker-Kimbrough said. “Get an early start, set the tone for the team and just try to get everyone going.”
With a series of layups and jumpers, Walker-Kimbrough continued her offensive tear with 13 more points in the second quarter. Pavlech realized during the period that Walker-Kimbrough was making nearly every shot she took, so she emphasized feeding the team’s leading scorer.
At one point in the frame, Walker-Kimbrough splashed three jumpers in a span of 97 seconds. Her lone miss during that stretch was the only two-point field goal she missed in 17 attempts.
“I was like, ‘Hey, are you tired? Because I’m going to keep running stuff for you,'” Pavlech said. “And she’s just kind of like, ‘Oh God,’ because I know she was tired, but I knew we had to get her the ball.”
Walker-Kimbrough finished with 24 first-half points, prompting Gillespie and Brianna Fraser, the team’s two freshmen, to bug their veteran counterpart about reaching 40 points. They would tell her how many points she had scored during every second-half timeout.
“We’re like, ‘Yeah, you got 35; we need five more,'” Gillespie said. “We were just trying to support her and just trying to boost her up.”
With 1:12 to go, Walker-Kimbrough met her teammates’ demands with her 45th 3-pointer on the season — good for the second most on the team. Moments later, she joined coach Brenda Frese at the postgame news conference.
One reporter asked Walker-Kimbrough how she planned to celebrate her 41-point outing. She avoided the question, instead opting to discuss the importance of the Terps securing a conference road win.
But then Frese chimed in. She knew exactly what Walker-Kimbrough would do.
“She’ll get back in the gym,” Frese said. “I mean, that’s what she does to celebrate. That doesn’t come by accident when you talk about the work to go 17-for-21 from the field. And if you saw how much time she puts in the gym, it’s a direct correlation to the time she puts in.”
