LAS VEGAS — As USC players grouped for a pregame meal hours before a gritty scrap with UCLA Friday night, freshman JuJu Watkins walked in and delivered a pregame announcement.
“I got something I wanted to show you guys in the next room,” she said, according to teammate Rayah Marshall.
Before they headed to Vegas for the Pac-12 women’s tournament, Marshall told Watkins: Imagine if we all bought matching shoes. The program’s shoe game, evidently, had been one of slim few points of dissatisfaction across a 25-5 regular season; they wore the same pair of white USC trainers. Not the biggest fans. So when the team ambled towards the treasure in the next room, they found pairs of gold Nike Romaleos waiting for them — plus a set of new white Nikes for the coaching staff — courtesy of one Judea Watkins.
“I’m like, ‘Ju, you’re lit for that,’” Marshall grinned, after Saturday’s practice at MGM Grand Garden Arena.
As she finished the story, a group of USC players, lingering to get up post-practice shots, erupted and started streaking across the hardwood in glee. Unclear what happened. Marshall didn’t see, either.
“Speaking of lit,’” Marshall laughed, on cue.
Coach Lindsay Gottlieb’s message to her team, ever since the trip to Vegas, has been simple: Have joy. Levity. They earned this. And the joy is rampant, even after a grueling 80-70 double-overtime win over UCLA Friday night that left Marshall with a puffy eye and Watkins with a sprained left ankle. With that joy, too, comes a sense of urgency — an opportunity in front of them, suddenly, for a group that’s in the final stages of a radical three-year transformation to leave the very final imprint on a legendary conference.
“I always just remember, what it’s like to be at the bottom,” junior Marshall said Saturday, reflecting on a freshman year going 12-16 in Gottlieb’s first year at USC. “So now, to be a top team and pose a threat to other teams, it’s a nice feeling.”
Their final threat in a three-game run in Vegas is none other than Stanford (28-4), the gold standard of West Coast women’s basketball, champions of the Pac-12 no less than 15 times in the tournament’s 21-year history. It’s not lost on Gottlieb, a group that’s felt like an underdog all season now headed for a collision course in the championship Sunday with the top-seeded Cardinals and legendary coach Tara VanDerveer.
“I said to them today, to a couple of them – cutting down nets is really rare,” Gottlieb said Saturday. “That confetti falling, it’s rare .. so while it was always the vision, I don’t know that you could picture it quite like this until you’re in it.”
IN GOOD HEALTH
Marshall’s not-quite-black eye, sustained after an inadvertent collision Saturday night, wasn’t her only battle scar of the night: scratches lined up and down her arms, banging relentlessly in the post through double-overtime.
“That game was a war for me, personally,” Marshall said Saturday.
It was a war for Watkins, too, who was still visibly limping at practice Saturday. After collapsing in pain and exiting and re-entering twice against UCLA with an ominous ankle injury, Watkins has been “doing treatment pretty much around the clock,” Gottlieb said Saturday.
Watkins will play, of course, against Stanford, Gottlieb continuing to rave over the freshman’s toughness. There’s no world in which she wouldn’t. But she’ll be hard-pressed to replicate her performance in USC’s previous outing against Stanford, a 51-point record-breaking explosion to lead the Trojans to an early-February upset.
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“You have to make them understand that, they earned that thing yesterday,” Gottlieb said. “Like, we had to battle. You have to do that again.”
BIG-TIME MATCHUP
Gottlieb struggled for words, searching for them in thin air after practice Saturday, to properly convey the performance of senior Kaitlyn Davis against UCLA.
“I can’t even — I think it’s as kind of newspaper-worthy, Instagram-clip-worthy as anything else we’ve done,” Gottlieb said.
The former Columbia transfer racked up a season-high 16 boards, adding three blocks and a pair of steals, hounding UCLA’s bigs and 6-foot-7 center Lauren Betts all night in a virtuoso performance. And USC will need a similar effort from her in a rotation of bigs against a Stanford team that’s predicted on their interior presence.
Bigs Kiki Iriafen and Cameron Brink — the coaches-voted Pac-12 Player of the Year — average a double-double, Brink in particular a consistent inside-out threat who is an interior force defensively. Beyond Watkins’ performance, USC beat Stanford in their first meeting by in large part limiting Iriafen and Brink’s impact (a combined 10-for-32 in USC’s win). In addition to Davis, Marshall and backup big Clarice Akunwafo, who did a fantastic job on Betts in limited minutes Friday, will need to match up consistently for USC to have any hope Sunday.