What do you do for an encore after you open the season with a career-high 29 points and 22 rebounds?
If you’re Fadima Tall, you go out and essentially do it again.
After opening the season on Monday night with a historic 20-20 performance in Princeton women’s basketball’s 63-52 win over Belmont, Tall registered another double-double on Friday night with 27 points and ten rebounds to lead her Tigers to a 65-57 comeback victory over host Richmond in the first round of the Opening Statement Tournament at the Robins Center.
“That’s what Fadima is capable of on any night, to put up numbers like that,” Gosselin told ESPN+ postgame. “But she’s just selfless in her want to win and her want to do whatever is needed to get to the W.”
The Tigers are now 2-0 to start the season, only because Tall has rescued the Tigers from late deficits in both games.
A rebuilt Spiders squad under first year head coach Alisa Kresge outworked the more experienced Tigers for more than three quarters on Friday night and built a nine-point lead with under seven minutes to play in the fourth quarter.
But Princeton clamped down on defense as they so often have done through the years in crunch time, and closed the game on a 19-2 run to snap Richmond’s 10-game home court winning streak.
Although Gosselin’s coaching tenure began with a promise to balance Princeton’s commitment to defense with a renewed emphasis on offense, it turned out that getting stops was once again the key to securing yet another road win over a top mid-major program.
“I told them it starts on defense,” Gosselin said postgame. “Let’s see if we can get some offense from our defense because our offense clearly wasn’t clicking for the majority of that game. The execution wasn’t there, but we can get energy from getting stops, getting out and running.”
The game started with sophomore guard Grace O’Sullivan netting the Tigers’ first points on a second chance layup in her first career start in place of injured guard Toby Nweke.
The contest seesawed for most of the first ten minutes until Ashley Chea splashed a step-back trey to tally her first points of the season and give the Tigers a 13-10 lead with 1:30 to play in the first quarter.
A drive to the cup by Rayne Wright bounced around the rim and fell in to shave the Tigers lead to one, 13-12, at the end of the first quarter.
In the second quarter, the Tigers expanded their lead to eight points behind the sharpshooting of Chea, who led the Tigers in the first half with seven points on three-for-three shooting.
The senior All-Ivy guard rebounded nicely from a poor opening night performance against Belmont in which she went 0-for-8 from the field and scored zero points.
Richmond responded to Princeton’s run with an 11-point run of their own to seize control of the game.
Led by freshman Arisa Ihara’s 11 first-half points, the Spiders out-hustled and out-executed the Tigers for the final seven minutes of the stanza to take a 31-27 lead into the intermission. Despite yielding a size advantage to Princeton in the post, the Spiders outscored the Tigers in the paint in the first half.
In the third quarter, Richmond continued to play like the aggressor as Princeton’s starters started to show signs of fatigue.
A three-pointer by Ava Persichetti gave Richmond an eight-point lead, 42-34, with 2:42 to go in the third.
But back-t0-back layups by Olivia Hutcherson to close the quarter cut Richmond’s lead to two, 44-42, at the end of the third quarter.
In the final stanza, Richmond took control and appeared to be on the verge of finishing off the Tigers.
Ally Sweeney, a senior guard from Sparta, N.J., opened the fourth quarter by swishing a trey from the top of the key to expand Richmond’s lead to five, 47-42.
A layup by Mari Bickley, her first field goal since rejoining the Tigers after missing the past two seasons, made it a once score game.
But a nearly three-minute scoring drought by the Tigers allowed Richmond to build a nine-point lead, 53-44, with under seven minutes to play.
With the game on the brink, Princeton’s offense finally awakened.
A drive in the lane got Chea to the charity stripe for two free throws. The senior guard tallied 13 points on five-for-ten shooting.
A defensive rebound by Chea led to an and-one layup by Tall to cut the deficit to four, 55-51, with 4:44 to play.
After Princeton secured another stop, Skye Belker found Tall wide open on the right wing and the senior drained a signature moonshot trey to make it a possession game, 57-54, with under four minutes to play. Moments later, Tall tallied again with a long two-pointer to give Princeton’s its first lead of the second half, 58-57, with two and change left on the clock.
A final trey from the indefatigable Tall at the 1:19-mark sealed Richmond’s fate as the Tigers completed yet another improbable comeback to boost Princeton to a 2-0 all-time record against the Spiders.
“You can’t put a price tag on the experience at the end of the day,” Gosselin explained about how Princeton managed once again to eke out a fourth-quarter victory. “They’ve been in a lot of situations and big games against great teams like Richmond, where we’ve been down. And when you’ve come back from that before, it helps to have that belief in the future that you can do it again.”
Yet while Gosselin’s Tigers can celebrate another gritty comeback, the harsh reality facing this team early into the campaign is that it must find a way to generate offense without relying solely on Tall to simply take over games.
The senior forward from Silver Spring, Md. has now scored 55 of Princeton’s 128 points, or 43% of the Tigers’ total output.
“I hope I don’t need to rely her for that kind of stat line every single night, because that’s certainly not a realistic expectation,” said Gosselin. “But she put the team yet again on her back down the stretch. And when someone’s hot, you got to run plays to feed that.”
Tall will have a chance to continue in hot streak in less than 48 hours as her Tigers will take on Murray State in the second game of the Opening Statement Tournament at Richmond on Sunday at noon.