Cal Sports Report

No. 24 Cal Women Hit From Long Range to Beat Temple

Golden Bears make 16 three-pointers to impove to 13-1 before their first ACC road trip

Jake Curtis

Cal women's basketball
Cal women's basketball / Photo by James Molgaard, KLC fotos
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The 24th-ranked Cal women's basketball team demonstrated on Sunday how impressive its offense can be when it is hitting its three-point shots.

The Bears improved their record to 13-1 while making 16 three-point shots in their 89-63 victory over Temple at Haas Pavilion.

The challenges now become more significant for Cal, which has 10 days off before playing a pair of ACC road games against Clemson on January 2 and SMU three days later. The Bears' only loss this season was a neutral-court defeat against Michigan State, which is unbeaten and ranked 15th this week. And Cal led that game by 12 points entering the fourth quarter.

But the Bears remained unbeaten at home (9-0) on Sunday thanks to their long-range game. The Bears entered the game ranked third in the nation in three-point shots made with 131. And on Sunday they added 16, two short of the school record of 18 set against Stanford a few weeks ago.

Cal ended up hitting 45.7% of its shots from beyond the arc (16-for-35), but the percentage was better when it mattered. A minute into the fourth quarter, Cal was 15-for-28 from long range, a cool 53.6%, and it's no coincidence that Cal held a 24-point lead (72-48) at that point.

The Bears attempted more three-point shots (35) than two-point shots (31) in this game, and that's not the first time that has happened this season.

Lulu Twidale and Ioanna Krimili scored 20 points apiece for the Bears, and they combined to make 12 three-point shots -- 6-for-11 for Twidale and 6-for-15 for Krimili.

And it was a long three-point shot that got Cal rolling.

The Bears held a shaky two-point lead with the clock running down at the end of the first half. With the clock down to two seconds, Krimili threw up a shot from about 35 feet away. It went through to give Cal a five-point lead at intermission, and the Bears quickly expanded that lead in the third quarter.

Cal put the game away by outscoring Temple (6-5) by 16 points in the third quarter (29-13), and the only excitement of the fourth quarter was provided by freshman Zahra King.

She put on a two-second display of ball-handling wizardry that should be on highlight videos. King went behind her back and between her legs in the blink of an eye before finishing with a layup:

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Jake Curtis
JAKE CURTIS

Jake Curtis worked in the San Francisco Chronicle sports department for 27 years, covering virtually every sport, including numerous Final Fours, several college football national championship games, an NBA Finals, world championship boxing matches and a World Cup. He was a Cal beat writer for many of those years, and won awards for his feature stories.

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