Texas' Shaylee Gonzales buries both 3-pointers and Dragons in NCAA first round | Bohls

DeYona Gaston was under the weather and didn’t even know if she would see the court.

Madison Booker did play, but had a rare off shooting game, scoring just eight points.

Shay Holle? Didn’t even score a point.

But Shaylee Gonzales did. Twenty-one of ‘em, in fact.

And she was the perfect complement to one of the best frontcourts in all of women’s college basketball.

Combine Gonzales’ season-high production and 44 more points in the paint, and they added up to walk-in-the-park 82-42 Longhorns win over a seriously outmatched Drexel team in first-round NCAA Women's Tournament play Friday afternoon at Moody Center.

That’s how good this No. 1-seeded Texas team is and can be.

"As long as they’re playing defense and rebounding, that’s how you win championships," Drexel coach Amy Mallon said of Texas. "If they continue to do that, they’ll be tough to beat."

Booker’s already been named to three All-American second and third teams as a freshman small forward-turned-point guard. She didn’t score much, but didn’t need to as she dished out a NCAA Tournament school-record 14 assists.

Gaston did play despite a lack of sleep and a lot of sluggishness and accounted for 10 of Texas’ 51 rebounds and plus-28 disparity on the boards as well as 11 points. She had lots of help from fellow post players Taylor Jones, Aaliyah Moore and others.

Holle missed all four of her 3-point tries, but delivered seven rebounds and shadowing defense on Drexel’s guards to help hold the Dragons to eight total points in one quarter and just 10 in another.

Teamwork, in other words.

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A little size and a little sizzle from Texas

This, of course, proved to be little more than a warmup for tougher games, starting Sunday with eighth seed Alabama, an 82-74 winner over Florida State. Texas came out in a full-court press to energize both the home team and the Moody Center crowd of 7.487 and raced to an early 9-0 lead.

Thereafter, it was Texas’ size and Texas’ sizzle from Gonzales.

The first is standard operating procedure for a team that averages 40 points in the lane, but the second is a bit out of the ordinary. Not that Gonzales can’t score. She’s actually a prolific shooter or was at BYU for four seasons, including a redshirt year, when the boxscores reflected 1,555 points and one game with 35.

Did Saturday’s game remind her of those days?

“Yeah, it did,” Gonzales said, a broad smile enveloping her face.

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'If Shaylee gets a rhythm going, I can empty the playbook for her'

We’re not here to suggest she’s the second coming of Caitlin Clark, but her confidence level wouldn’t allow her to take a backseat to anyone, even Iowa’s sharpshooter. Scoring from Gonzales and Holle can be difference-makers for a peaking Longhorns team.

“It makes all the difference in the world when we can make shots,” head coach Vic Schaefer said. “If Shaylee gets a rhythm going, I can empty the playbook for her. Didn’t want to show everything today. We need her or Shay to make shots. If both do, it’s a bonus.”

Few teams in this NCAA field can match Schaefer’s club physicality and ability to score inside.

Mallon tried to pack it in inside in the second half to defuse the frontcourt, but that only opened up Gonzales on the wing. And when you chip in five 3-pointers from Gonzales, the Longhorns can be almost downright unbeatable.

“I was wide open,” Gonzales said. “They didn’t guard the wings very well.”

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Gonzales, the sixth-year guard from Gilbert, Ariz., clearly is a luxury on this team. But don’t misread her value to this 31-4 club. She’s evolved as a defender as well, one of the reasons she changed schools.

The 5-foot-10-inch graduate transfer from BYU has progressed immeasurably since arriving in Austin two years ago and has become a tenacious defender along with the glue-like Holle to help atone for the loss of the injured Rori Harmon.

“I wanted to be on a better team that could go deeper in the tournament,” Gonzales said. “I wanted a better chance to go to a Final Four and win a national championship.”

Texas will meet much tougher competition en route if a spot in Cleveland is its destination. That starts with a physical Alabama, which made 51% of its shots, including seven 3-pointers, and out rebounded FSU by 14.

When I razzed Schaefer about holding Gonzales back all this time, he smirked and said, “She really looked good tonight. We need her to play like that.”

Sooner or later, Texas' long shots will have to fall

The Longhorns could well be vulnerable to a hot-shooting perimeter team because they themselves don’t rely very heavily on the three-ball. They rank just 314th nationally with four 3-pointers a game while other No. 1 seeds are much more explosive from long range. Top-ranked South Carolina averages 6.5 threes, USC a nifty 7.5 and Caitlin Clark’s Hawkeyes sink 11.3 of the bombs every time on the floor.

That Texas shoots them modestly puts more pressure on the post players and Booker, the only Longhorn capable of consistently creating her own shot. And if the Horns run up against the Gamecocks or Stanford Cardinal, clubs that match Texas’ physicality, they’ll need shots from the perimeter to fall.

“That’s where the Shays come into play as well as defending the three, which has kind of been Vic’s teams’ kryptonite at times over the years over the years with Oklahoma and teams that really like to push the tempo and make your post players come out and defend the three,” said Longhorns legend and current broadcaster Andrea Lloyd. “That’s been a challenge at times for Vic’s teams.”

It’ll be incumbent upon Gonzales and Holle to hold up their end, both offensively and defensively.

Booker, for one, thinks her team is up to the task, especially if she’s spreading dimes as she did Saturday.

“I love to put them in places they can score, and we’ll all look good,” Booker said. “It brings me so much joy for Shaylee to be confident like that. When she’s on fire, I’m going to give her the ball every time.”

Mallon sure didn’t locate a weakness from where she sat. Her Dragons made just three of their 14 long-range shots and were overwhelmed by the barrage of shots from Gonzales and the frontcourt and the diverse contributions by Holle.

“Shaylee had a pretty good stat line for a 2 guard,” Schaefer said. “And Shay has seven rebounds and leads us in blocked shots. I love ‘em. Those two have helped us win a lot of games.”

And Schaefer hopes another five more.

Sunday's second round

No. 1 Texas (31-4) vs. No. 8 Alabama (xx), time TBA, Moody Center, 103.1

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas women's basketball gets long-range help from Shaylee Gonzales