STARKVILLE — Tiffany Mitchell made a case Sunday for a third-straight Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.
You would be hard-pressed to find any one in the record crowd of 10,626 at Humphrey Coliseum to say Mitchell wasn’t the best player on the floor in the No. 2 South Carolina women’s basketball team’s 57-51 victory against No. 10 Mississippi State.
Mitchell’s statistics — a game-high 21 points on 6-of-15 shooting from the field and an 8-of-9 effort from the free-throw line — supported that claim. But the timing of Mitchell’s scoring and her defensive work on MSU leading scorer Victoria Vivians underscored the dual-threat nature of the 5-foot-9 senior guard from Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Tiffany is probably one of the most conditioned athletes I have ever been around,” South Carolina coach Dawn Staley said. “She has put herself in a position to go 40 minutes if need be. She always plays our opponent’s top offensive player. I don’t know what we are going to do without her next year. We’re counting down the days and the games, but there probably never will be another Tiffany Mitchell that will wear a Gamecocks’ jersey. I am not surprised by her performance.”
Staley is accustomed to excellence. The former All-America point guard at Virginia won three Olympic gold medals as a member of the United State women’s basketball teams. As a coach, she built Temple into a regular in the NCAA tournament. At South Carolina, Staley has transformed a program that once was at the bottom of the SEC into a contender for the national title.
Mitchell has played a key role in the Gamecocks’ rise. As a freshman, she was a member of the team that advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament. South Carolina (19-0, 7-0 SEC) has reached the Sweet 16 and the Final Four in each of the past two seasons thanks in large part to the work of Mitchell. She has averaged 15.5 and 14.4 points per game while shooting 49.3 and 50 percent from the field. This season, Mitchell is scoring at nearly the same clip — 14.6 ppg. entering the game against MSU — but her field goal shooting has dipped to 41.3 percent.
There was no slippage Sunday afternoon.
With South Carolina clinging to a 42-41 lead, Mitchell was called for a charge on Dominique Dillingham. The turnover gave Bulldogs (17-4, 4-3) a chance to take the lead and send the crowd into a frenzy. But Mitchell wasn’t going to let that happen. She went strong to the basket and drew a foul on Dillingham and converted the free throws. Mitchell had the same I-will-not-be-stopped look on her face on the next possession when she drove and converted a three-point play. She capped the spurt by beating the defense down the court for an uncontested layup that gave the Gamecocks a 49-43 lead with 3 minutes, 2 seconds remaining.
“I just felt that I turned the ball over a lot, kind of unforced turnovers and a lot of charges, and wasn’t reading the defense, so after she took that charge, I tried to look at the floor some and kind of open up the floor,” Mitchell said. “The floor opened up and it created a lane for me to drive. That is when I attacked.
“The game was really close, and I know coach Staley is comfortable with me having the ball in my hand in close situations like that, so she trusts me and I just made a play.”
South Carolina still had plays to make, though. Two free throws by Morgan William cut the deficit to 51-49 with 51.8 seconds to play. But senior guard Khadijah Sessions hit a pull-up jump shot in the lane with 30.2 seconds left. Asia Dozier added two free throws with 22.9 seconds to go before Mitchell sealed the deal with two more free throws with 9.4 seconds remaining.
“I think we wore them down,” Mitchell said. “That’s what we do. We know we’re not going to blow everybody out in the first 10 or 15 minutes. We know we have to keep pounding it at them in the last minute make a run, that is what we’re going to do.”
Tina Roy added 11 points, Sessions had 10, and A’ja Wilson had six points, 11 rebounds, and four blocked shots to help South Carolina stay on track for a showdown with No. 1 Connecticut at 7 p.m. Feb. 8 in Columbia, South Carolina. South Carolina will have to play Ole Miss, Texas A&M, and Kentucky prior to that game, but Wilson, a 6-5 sophomore forward who was the SEC Freshman of the Year last season, feels good knowing the Gamecocks have Mitchell on their side.
“That is Takeover Tiff,” Wilson said. “We don’t have social media, but you can start it if you want.”
Staley, who was sitting two places to the left, chimed in, “Hashtag?” Staley is active on Twitter, so she knows how to use the # as a symbol for a hashtag, which is marks key words or topics in a Tweet. Twitter users created it as a way to categorize messages.
Wilson said Mitchell has a knack for coming up in big spots.
“That is just who she is,” Wilson said. “It is not really in the scoring. It is just really in the captain and the leadership and how she takes over on and off the court and in the huddles. That is just her.”
Wilson and Mitchell showed in the post-game news conference they are equally capable of thinking quickly when they were asked if Sessions and Dozier had hashtags that trumpeted their clutch play. Wilson thought for a few seconds before Mitchell said, “SealtheDealSessions.”
“OK, OK, OK, OK,” Wilson said, nodding her head.
Said Mitchell, “Don’tTryHerDozier.”
“There it go,” Wilson said, like an appreciative listener of a smooth jazz groove. “I like that, too.”
Mitchell would have praised the contributions of junior center Alaina Coates (six points, 11 rebounds), sophomore guard Bianca Cuevas, and senior Sarah Imovbioh if asked. Instead, she said the work of Sessions and Dozier has been instrumental in helping the Gamecocks solidify their spot as one of the nation’s top teams. In a way, the team’s versatility is a lot like Mitchell’s play in that South Carolina can beat you in a high-scoring game — like it did in an 88-80 victory against then-No. 6 Ohio State in the season opener — or in a knock-down, drag-out defensive scrum against MSU.
“It is not a two-man team,” Mitchell said. “It is going to take everybody on this team, so when your number is called you have to be ready. I think they were definitely ready today.”
Mitchell tried to her best to add to that defensive effort, shadowing Vivians, who entered the game as the SEC’s leading scorer (17.6 ppg.). Vivians worked free several times and shook Mitchell on a nifty pump-fake jump shot in which she floated in the air for a few seconds, but Mitchell held Vivians to 7-of-25 shooting (2 of 9 from 3-point range) and 19 points in 39 minutes.
“I tried to contest all of her shots,” Mitchell said. “That was the game plan was. I just tried to bother her as much as possible. I knew she was going to get a lot of shots up, so I just tried to make every shot she took hard.”
Staley, too, is glad to have Mitchell on her side, even if she is only guaranteed 12 more games. South Carolina figures to play more than that, though, as it looks to win another SEC tournament title and take two more steps to a national crown.
With a player like Mitchell doing it all, South Carolina has a weapon very few teams in the country can equal.
“I would sell her short if I had to choose (if she had a bigger impact on the game on offense or on defense),” Staley said. “I think what makes Tiffany special is her approach to the game. She wants to win. She wants to make an impact on both sides of the ball, so I would sell her short if I didn’t say all of it. You can’t take Tiffany Mitchell and just take her offense because she is more than that type of player.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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