Feb. 25, 2004
Game Notes in PDF Format
Download Free Acrobat Reader
The South Carolina Gamecocks and the Kentucky Wildcats conclude their 2004 home-and-away series Thursday night in a contest that could turn out as one of the most important games of the season for the two teams. Game time is 7:00 p.m. at Memorial Gym in Lexington, Kentucky.
With a win Thursday, South Carolina (10-15, 1-11) could move into a tie with Kentucky (10-15, 2-10) for 11th place in the SEC. Both teams have Sunday opponents (Vanderbilt vs. USC; Kentucky at Georgia) but if both teams were to win Sunday (or lose), the teams would finish with identical records and would turn to tiebreakers to determine SEC Tournament seeding.
The first tiebreaker would look at the head-to-head record between South Carolina and Kentucky. Since a win tonight by the Gamecocks would mean a split in the series, the SEC would move to the second tiebreaker; team records against other SEC teams starting with the #1 seed, Tennessee, and working down the conference standings. Both teams captured only a win over Alabama so the SEC Office would utilize a coin toss to determine the recipient of 11th and 12th place.
South Carolina’s scoring attack is led by its starting lineup with three of the five players contributing double figures. Kelly Morrone leads the way with 12.6 points per contest while Cristina Cicoan is second at 12.5. Iva Sliskovic is third with a per-game-points average of 10.9 and the freshman also leads the team on the backboards with 7.0 boards per game. The other two USC starters are within tenths-of-a-point of the double-figure window as Olga Gritsaeva is contributing 9.6 points per contest with Lauren Simms fifth on the team in scoring at 9.4. After becoming South Carolina’s career assists leader on January 28th, Cristina Ciocan is now 12th in the all-time SEC records with 610 distributions. She only needs five more points to reach the 1,000-point plateau while Kelly Morrone is 33 points shy of the 1,000 mark.
The Wildcat scoring is led by three players in double figures. Sara Potts’ 16.2 points and SeSe Helm’s 15.0 per game averages led the way with Jenny Pfeiffer third at 11.8. Pfeiffer has not played since the January 22nd game at Mississippi State after being diagnosed with mono. She is attempting to return for the SEC Tournament next week. Helm leads the team’s efforts on the boards with seven rebounds a contest.
Kentucky leads the series by an 18-13 margin and have won 10 of the 14 outings at Memorial Gym. South Carolina has captured six of the last eight games between the two teams, including the last two played in Lexington.
