North Dakota State women’s basketball team is coming off a 1-1 opening weekend and looked impressive in both games.

The Bison fell to a New Mexico State team that’s coming off a NCAA tournament appearance last season before blowing out the College of Saint Mary by 20 points two days later.

Even with a solid performance in both of those games, one problem showed its head: lack of depth.

If this team plans on making any sort of noise in the Summit League this year, they are going to need to get a few players healthy. This short bench will lead to more games like the one that took place on Friday night. NDSU has a roster talented enough to keep the game against the Aggies competitive, only losing by 10.

Only when (or if) this team can get a solid rotation going will it do some damage come league play.

In the loss to NMSU, the Bison played a near perfect game.

They had better stats in nearly every category,and shot a better percentage from inside and outside the arc as well as from the free throw line.

The one outlier with the stats was turnovers.

Entering halftime, NDSU had a six-point lead on the Aggies, and it appeared that there was an upset on the horizon.

NDSU was only able to play seven women throughout the entire game due to various injuries, while NMSU was able to play 10.

This led to the Aggies pressing the short-handed Bison in the second half, which led to increase in turnovers (23) by NDSU because they just didn’t have any gas in the tank. Aggies took advantage and jumped out to an eventual insurmountable lead.

Four Bison played more than 15 minutes with two playing at least 20 minutes. NMSU had only one player above 15 minutes and they played 17.