USC women eye two valuable wins on upcoming road trip ...Middle East

The USC women’s basketball team can pick up two valuable wins in this week’s road trip to Northwestern and Illinois.

It is among five teams sitting at 5-6 in the middle of the Big Ten Conference standings, and the Trojans are ranked a respectable 20th in the NET rankings. The latter takes into account additional factors like game results, strength of schedule, game location and play efficiency.

USC (13-9 overall) showed that it can outplay a high-quality opponent when it beat No. 10 Iowa, which was ranked eighth at the time, and proved it can out-tough a relentless opponent when it beat Rutgers.

The Trojans have rebounded from late January’s four-game losing streak and can finish the regular season strong. Next up is Northwestern (8-14, 2-9) on Thursday, then Illinois (16-6, 6-5) on Sunday.

“Really excited to build from here,” head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said after the Rutgers win. “This is a fun group. They’ve stayed locked in, super coachable. Love the mentality. I thought we didn’t have our ‘A’ game offensively tonight, but we definitely had our ‘A’ game with toughness.”

Northwestern is on a four-game losing streak but has a major offensive weapon in 6-foot-4 forward Grace Sullivan, who’s the third-best scorer in the Big Ten with 22.4 points a game. She also makes 51.2% of her shots from the field.

Illinois, on paper, is the more formidable team of the two on this road trip. The Illini have been hovering outside of the Top 25 for the past three weeks and picked up a 75-66 road win at No. 24 Washington on Sunday.

Cearah Parchment had her third consecutive 20-point game and pulled down 10 rebounds in the win to help Illinois win.

“She’s such a hard guard because we can pick and pop her,” Illinois head coach Shauna Green said in a radio interview after the game.

“We can post her up and when she rebounds like that and offensive rebounds like that – she made so many game-winning plays. We talk about that all the time – how do you impact winning? And she sure is impacting winning a lot for us.”

The Illini also forced Washington to commit 16 turnovers while only turning the ball over eight times themselves. Illinois takes good care of the ball and turns it over third-least in the conference with 12.5 giveaways a game.

USC has struggled at times to maintain control of the ball in recent games and has averaged 15.1 turnovers throughout conference play. The Trojans had 19 against Rutgers, which used a zone defense to stifle them in the first half.

Trojans guard Kennedy Smith has the potential to take over in these situations. The 6-foot-1 sophomore is a key facilitator in the offense, getting the ball to high-volume shooter Jazzy Davidson (16.2 ppg) and high-IQ shooter Kara Dunn (15.9 ppg).

“Consistency and growth. That’s been a topic of discussion,” Smith said. “We had that losing streak, so it’s just staying together, wanting to grow in every aspect of the game, whether that’s communication or wanting to be better.”

USC (13-9 overall, 5-6 Big Ten) at Northwestern (8-14, 2-9)

When: 6 p.m. PT Thursday

Where: Welsh-Ryan Arena, Evanston, Illinois

TV/Radio: Big Ten Network/USCTrojans.com/Listen

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