SPOKANE, Wash. – UCLA. LSU. Part II. High noon Sunday.
Losing Part I in the Sweet 16 exactly one year ago – on March 30, 2024 – has informed much of the UCLA women’s basketball team’s success this season: The Bruins are the No. 1 overall seed, 33-2 and entering the NCAA Elite Eight for the third time in program history, thanks to Friday’s 76-62 win over Ole Miss in the Sweet 16.
They’re more experienced, more poised. And they have Lauren Betts, who has gone from good to great to dominant. And, you bet, with a shot at reaching the NCAA Tournament Final Four for the first time in program history, the Bruins also want their lick back.
“Some of us wanted to play LSU just ’cause we knew we lost to them and we want to win,” UCLA wing Gabriela Jaquez said. “And we know we’re capable of beating them.”
She sounded a lot like her teammates who said the quiet, obvious part out loud before they went and defeated USC in the Big Ten Tournament championship game, avenging two earlier losses to the Trojans.
For LSU (31-5), winning Part I is about all the Tigers remember about winning Part 1. “I don’t know that we’ve really thought about that win very much,” said Tigers coach Kim Mulkey, whose team went on to lose its national championship rematch with Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the Elite Eight.
The only other thing they really seem to remember, to hear Mulkey tell it at Saturday’s news conference, was that there was an offensive article written about them. They’re still thinking about it: “We took that personal,” star guard and rapper Flau’Jae Johnson volunteered when asked about UCLA. “And I think the core of us who the article was about, we’re still here.”
UCLA remembers a lot more about that 78-69 loss in Albany, New York, including how the Bruins lost, wilting in the heat down the stretch. LSU outscored the Bruins 14-2 over the final 2:46, proving that basketball is 10% what happens to you, 90% how you react to it.
“We definitely didn’t like the way in which we approached our game with LSU last year,” Close said. “Both physically and our tempo and aggression, but also mentally in terms of our confidence that we came into the game with. And I think this year, this team has earned different levels of confidence and aggression that I think puts us in a better position to be our best.”
The Bruins got in the practice lab, and put themselves through all variety of chaos experiment.
Sometimes, that meant adding an extra defender, or doing drills in which players are at an automatic disadvantage. Other times, Close called consecutive “terrible” foul calls or instructed the scout guys to deliver some cheap shots (“not dangerously,” she stressed). As Grant Boydell, a 6-1 sophomore statistics student and UCLA scout guy who played guard for Sonoma Valley High School, described his assignment: “Go as hard as I can.”
Keep calm, carry on. Go hard and get the ball to Betts.
The Bruins’ 6-foot-7 center scored 31 points in 31 minutes on 15-for-16 shooting Friday, when she also had 10 rebounds and three blocks. That after she had 30 points on 14-for-17 shooting and 14 rebounds in a second-round win over Richmond – which made her the first Division I player with consecutive stat lines of at least 30 points and 10 rebounds and 80% shooting in 20 years, per ESPN.
“I’m not going to tell you what we’re going to do, but we will try to do a lot of things,” said Mulkey of how her team will defend Betts. “We have seen so many teams and film do different things. We watch and we study defenses a lot.
“[But] sometimes you can have a great game plan, and they still expose you, and they’re still good. She’s good. So we’re going to try what we can do, and if we don’t succeed at that, we’ll go to Plan B and try that.
“And you know, hopefully she will get tired,” Mulkey joked. “I think I saw something where she said she was tired. I was like, ‘Woo, I kind of like that.’ She won’t get tired. Great players don’t get tired. They fight through it.”
That’s what all the chaotic conditioning has been for.
NCAA TOURNAMENT REGIONAL FINAL
Who: No. 1 seed UCLA (33-2) vs. No. 3 seed LSU (31-5)
When: Noon Sunday
Where: Spokane Arena, Spokane, Wash.
TV: KABC (Ch. 7)