Already trailing by eight points on the road at Mississippi State, and with starting point guard Kierra Fletcher forced to watch from the bench after picking up two fouls, Dawn Staley turned to Raven Johnson for extended minutes.
Johnson scored a quick seven points, including knocking down her first 3-pointer since the Clemson game on Nov. 17, as South Carolina fought back from the early hole to pull out a 58-51 victory in Starkville.
“We had to play her,” Staley said post-game. “Kierra got into some early foul trouble, and we don’t hesitate to put Raven in. We know what type of player she is, and it was great to have her step in and give us the boost and energy that we needed to get back in the game.”
Johnson finished the game with seven points, five rebounds, two assists and two steals in a season-high 21 minutes to continue her momentum from earlier in the week. Last time out in a home game against Auburn, Johnson came off the bench and managed to match her — and South Carolina’s — season high for assists in a game this season. She dished out seven dimes, extending her lengthy team-lead in the department.
Now adding in the Mississippi State game, Johnson has 48 assists on the season for an average of three per game. Nobody else on the team is even at 40, with the next closest being starting guard Brea Beal with 39 assists through 16 games.
“I think Raven’s a lot more comfortable as well,” Staley said about Johnson after the Auburn game. “They’re [Johnson and Fletcher] different in that they run the team a little bit different. I think Kierra is a little more methodical, and Raven is a little more free-wheeling, getting the ball to people where they can be effective.”
Johnson’s creativity on the ball helped provide a different look for the Gamecocks against yet another tight matchup zone defense on Sunday. The Bulldogs held South Carolina to its lowest shooting percentage of the season — 30.3 percent — but a 20-point second quarter with Johnson on the court for eight out of 10 minutes ended up being the difference in a tight win.
And through it all, she is still working back from a significant knee injury. Johnson arrived on campus last season, but tore her ACL in just the second game of the regular season and redshirted. Even through the first month of this season, she was playing with a brace on her knee in game and was still trying to find the comfort of how to maneuver through her recovery.
But now playing in what has developed into her first full season of college basketball and getting crucial minutes for the top-ranked team in the country, Johnson is finding the comfort a little more in each game. The explosiveness is back in transition, as is the burst when she takes on a defender off the dribble.
In a tough road environment and what proved to be South Carolina’s closest game of the season other than the overtime win at Stanford, the best version of Johnson was the spark plug the team needed to shake off a sluggish start and run a more efficient, mistake-free offense.
“There’s no room for us to have mental breakdowns or mental mistakes because people will make us pay for it,” Staley said . “I thought Mississippi State did that today. They played with energy, effort, the crowd got into it and they found themselves always in the basketball game. Sometimes it definitely takes four quarters to actually win a game in our league.”
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