Maye Toure scores 22 as Utah women's basketball overwhelms Weber State

Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Maye Toure led Utah with 22 points in a dominant 86-46 win.
• Utah coach Lynne Roberts expressed dissatisfaction with the team's second-half performance.
• Weber State's Rose Bubaker and Margarita Satini each scored 10 points in the loss.

SALT LAKE CITY — In the first five minutes of the game, Utah women's basketball had already scored enough points to top the scoring production of the visiting Weber State Wildcats at halftime.

The Wildcats finished the first half with 17 turnovers and the Utes scored 30 points on the other end as a result to control a 33-point lead at the break. It didn't get much better for Weber State from there — even if Utah head coach Lynne Roberts was pleased by her squad's second-half performance.

Utah went on beat the Wildcats 86-46 Thursday night, led by the all-around dominant performance of transfer forward Maye Toure, who finished with a game-high 22 points, including two 3-pointers, five rebounds and two assists in the win.

Gianna Kneepkens added 15 points, including three 3-pointers, and five rebounds; and Kennady McQueen finished with 13 points, three rebounds and three assists. To round out the team scoring, Ines Vieira added 12 points as the fourth player to finish in double figures, while contributing eight assists.

It was a 40-point win by Utah (2-0), but Roberts was disappointed by her team's second half performance.

"I'm happy with the win," Roberts said. "I'm not exactly — I'm not at all happy with our second half. I didn't think we did a good job at all. ... It's hard to be grumpy after a 40-point win, but somehow I am."

About three minutes into the fourth quarter, Roberts was done with her team's performance and called a timeout. A visibly frustrated Roberts directed her players on the court to take a seat on the bench in an effort to refocus her team.

It was enough to send a message to her players, even with an already comfortable lead.

"We kind of figuratively punched them in the mouth there in that first half, but then we just took our foot off the gas and got sloppy in all areas — offense, defense, whatever," Roberts said. "It's a process, and it's only Game 2 and we're 2-0, but there's a lot for us to improve upon."

The Wildcats (1-1) turned the tide a bit in the second half and only managed five turnovers in the final two quarters, limiting much of what made Utah successful in the opening half.

Weber State was led in scoring by forward Rose Bubaker and Margarita Satini, who each finished with 10 points apiece and five combined rebounds in the loss.

The Utes kicked off the night with a Kneepkens 3-pointer just 10 seconds into the game, followed by a McQueen triple after the first of many turnovers by the Wildcats. And Utah was off and rolling en route to a 10-0 start to the game.

Utah had no trouble showcasing its dominance on both ends of the floor against Weber State in the first two quarters, holding the Wildcats to just 14 points, but struggled to find that same rhythm in the second half.

"I'd say the ball got really sticky," Vieira said. "We weren't able to execute ... and we weren't able to make that change. So next game, it's going to be really different. We've got to learn from this, but just ball was really sticky, and then we weren't taking pride on the defense."

Utah's competition increases in level of difficulty next Thursday with a road contest against Northwestern (5 p.m. MST).

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Josh Furlong

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Josh is the sports director at KSL.com and beat writer covering University of Utah athletics — primarily football, men’s and women's basketball and gymnastics. He is also an Associated Press Top 25 voter for college football.